Amplifying Your Voice in Tech

How writing and speaking can help your career

Growing up, my parents and teachers taught me that all I needed to do was work hard and I would be duly rewarded with good grades, fancy university degrees, and a promising career. After five-plus years of working in tech, I’ve learned that diligence and care alone are often not enough to accelerate my career. While I obviously still prioritize excelling within my teams, I’ve also started taking concrete measures to build a reputation for myself outside of my company — in short, developing a personal brand (as much as I loathe the term).

Screaming into the abyss about my professional accomplishments.

“Why bother building a personal brand?”

• Job opportunities: The first and most obvious benefit of having a strong external reputation is access to better job opportunities than the ones spamming your LinkedIn inbox right now. Let’s say you are angling for a job that’s a stretch goal, whether because you don’t quite have the years of experience the company is asking for, or perhaps you haven’t yet led a team — a good personal brand can help you make up the gap between what your resume shows and what the company desires.
• Promotion and compensation: I used to work in a company of over 13,000 people, with over 70 people in Product alone. Hardly anyone outside of my team and my direct manager knew whether or not I was doing a good job. If you’re dealing with a similar situation, then a strong personal brand can help you sway performance review committees, giving them more favorable data points to consider beyond a few generic-sounding 360 feedback forms.

Don’t let yourself end up in this situation.

• Hiring a strong team: As you advance in your career, you’re probably spending a lot more time on hiring a great team than on finding the next best job. The most promising candidates you interview will have a wealth of employment options to choose between. If you have a highly active Twitter account or Youtube videos of yourself speaking at conferences, that could just be the thing that convinces your ninja-rockstar-unicorn candidate to climb on board.

“Cool, so how do I go about building a personal brand?”

The tech industry has created a bevy of tools to help us interact with each other, whether we want to do it in-person or online, in 280 characters or 2,800 words. Here are a few ways you can get started on crafting a reputation outside your company:

• Mentor introductions: Don’t be shy about grabbing time with leaders in your company in order to get to know them better and learn about how they got to where they are today. Once you’ve established a working mentor-mentee relationship, ask them to introduce you to people in their network who are experts in areas that you want to learn more about. While people might ignore a random inbound message on LinkedIn, they’re less likely to turn down an introduction from someone they know.
• Social media: Unless you’re planning to become an Instagram influencer, I would stick to professionally focused Facebook/Slack groups, Twitter threads, Quora, LinkedIn, Hacker News, and Medium. Each social media outlet has its own quirks, so check out the power users from each channel and study what some of the most successful posts have in common.
• Events: Attending conferences, meetups, and networking sessions can be a good way to initially expand your network, but don’t stop at simply getting to know other participants. Set a goal for yourself to start speaking at conferences (even if it’s just a 5-minute lightning talks) by establishing yourself as an expert on a certain topic.
• Open Source Projects: This is less applicable for me as a product manager, but for engineers, a major way to meet engineers outside of your current company is to contribute to an open source project. Check out this extremely comprehensive guide to getting started with open source here.

Whichever route you select, make sure it fits your personality and strengths, otherwise you’ll just burn yourself out. For example, I consider myself a shy extrovert; I love spending time with friends, but go clammy at the thought of walking up to a random stranger at a networking event. For me, Medium has been an invaluable way to amplify my voice in tech (so meta). I find that the long-form text format allows me to fully express my thoughts in a way that Twitter doesn’t, and the closest thing to trolls I encounter are grumpy commenters who disagree with me on product development processes.

Me when I sat down to write my first Medium post

“Ok I’m sold, but I have no idea what to write about…”

A lot of folks I’ve talked to have expressed this sentiment or its close cousin, “But everything I want to write about has already been said.” Don’t worry about the latter. Even if the topic is more tired than a Barkleys Marathons runner at the end of the second loop, you can find a way to put your own spin on it. Here are a few potential ideas for blog posts:

• Best practices or tips on what’s worked for you in your field (e.g. “5 workflow efficiency tools all PMs should use”)
• Case studies of problems you’ve faced at work (e.g. “How we successfully migrated from MongoDB to Postgres in two months”)
• New technologies in your industry (e.g. “Applications of AR in audio content”)
• Life skills they don’t teach you in school (e.g. “How to file taxes if you exercised your equity options”)

Here at Aaptiv, we encourage our teammates to not only produce great work, but also to share their insights and learnings with the broader tech community. From our engineering team (“Ingesting Musical Content at Scale Using DDEX”) all the way up to our CEO (“How I learned to stop worrying and love working capital”), we use Medium as a way to recruit great talent, and to help each other build strong personal brands. In our biweekly sprint retrospectives, we reflect on our learnings; then we figure out if there’s any way to turn those learnings into a written piece.

Our blog (like our company) is still small, but growing quickly — we actively try to maintain a 1-post per month schedule, and we budget time for Medium posts in our sprint planning. In short, prioritizing your team’s professional development doesn’t just mean teaching them to improve their skills. You should also give them the tools and opportunities to build their own personal brands — that could make the difference in helping them succeed in tech.

This post has been adapted from a lightning talk I gave at “Amplifying Your Voice in Tech”, an event organized by Women in Product NYC and sponsored by Vimeo. I’m deeply grateful to Yasi, Prerna, and Katrina for having me and helping me further my personal brand.