Outcome-Backwards Skill Acquisition
Pick an outcome that would prove you learned the skill, then work backwards to the experts.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 95%
Instead of studying a new discipline in the abstract, Jules Walter names a concrete business outcome whose achievement would itself be evidence he has acquired the skill. He then works backwards: formulate the questions that must be answered to hit that outcome, read just enough to sharpen the questions, take them to the best practitioners in the field, execute a loop, and return to the mentor with results. The outcome is a forcing function; the mentors are the shortcut; the loop is where the learning compounds.
Origin
Developed by Jules Walter when he joined Slack in 2016 as its first growth PM with no growth background. He credits Bangaly Kaba (then at Facebook) and Adriel Frederick for the growth frameworks he applied, and describes the resulting activation gains as double-digit percentage moves within six months.
Core principles
- 01An outcome you can be held to is a better teacher than a curriculum.
- 02Read a little, not a lot — reading's job is to sharpen your questions, not to answer them.
- 03The fastest path to a field's frameworks is a person who already uses them, not a book about them.
- 04Closing the loop with the mentor (reporting the result) is what converts a one-off tip into a relationship and a skill.
- 05You can learn without this, but this is dramatically faster.
How to run it
- 1
Name the proof-outcome
Choose a specific, measurable outcome such that hitting it would be proof you now have the skill. Walter's was: within six months, ship enough successful experiments to move Slack's activation by X%.
Pro tip Bind it to a deadline and a metric your job already cares about, so your incentives and your learning point the same way.
Watch out A vague goal ('get better at growth') gives you nothing to work backwards from and no way to know you succeeded.
- 2
Work backwards into questions
From the outcome, derive the set of questions that, if answered, would let you drive it. E.g. 'What frameworks should I use to drive activation? What are best practices? What are examples?'
Pro tip Write the questions down — they become the agenda for every expert conversation that follows.
- 3
Read a little to refine the questions
Do a small amount of reading on the topic — enough to be sure you are asking the right questions, then stop. Reading is calibration, not the main event.
Watch out Over-reading is the most common way to feel productive while learning nothing you can apply.
- 4
Find the field's best people and take the questions to them
Identify the company or people who defined the discipline (for growth in 2016, that was Facebook), find a route to a conversation, and use your prepared questions to extract frameworks and pointers.
Pro tip Ask 'which company defined this field?' first — it narrows the search for who to talk to.
- 5
Run the loop and get real results
Apply the pointers immediately in your own context — commission user research, pull the data, look at what correlates with the metric, ship experiments — and let the results land, good or bad.
Pro tip Do the smallest version of the framework you can actually ship inside a sprint; the result is the data you take back.
- 6
Report back and re-load
Return to the mentor with what you did and what happened, thank them, and bring the next problem. Rinse and repeat until the outcome is driven and the skill is real.
Pro tip The report-back is what earns you the next conversation — most people never do it.
Watch out Skipping the report-back makes the relationship transactional and it will quietly die.
In the wild
Walter joined Slack in early 2016 as first growth PM knowing nothing about growth ('I was telling myself, I hope they don't fire me'). He set the outcome — move activation by a set percentage within six months — worked backwards to questions about activation frameworks, identified Facebook as the company that defined growth, and got to Bangaly Kaba and Adriel Frederick, whom he had met at a random event. They gave him frameworks (understand, identify, execute) and told him to spend far more time understanding why people were not staying on Slack. He then ran user research and data analysis, shipped onboarding and mobile experiments, and reported results back.
→ Within six months he shipped new-user-experience changes that moved top-line activation by double-digit percentages, and he repeated the same loop later for monetization and for building a growth org.
Common mistakes
Studying instead of shipping
Reading articles and 'learning an insight' then returning to business as usual produces no skill. The outcome must put your neck on the line so the learning has to convert into action.
Going to the expert without a specific question
Without derived, outcome-linked questions, an expert conversation becomes a career-story chat that yields nothing you can apply on Monday.
Never closing the loop
Taking the advice and disappearing wastes the single highest-leverage asset you have — the expert's willingness to give you more.
Is it for you?
Best for
An operator (PM, founder, functional lead) dropped into a domain they have never done before and who has a real business metric they own.
Not ideal for
Exploratory learning with no owned metric, or fields where practitioners are inaccessible and outcomes take years to observe.
From the transcript
“when I'm trying to learn something new, I try to think about what is an outcome that I could drive. And if I drive this…”
“And then what I do is I read a little bit, not a lot, about the topic just to make sure I'm asking the right…”
“And then I after I go through a loop where I actually see results, whether they're”
From the episode
Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career
Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack)