How to Level Up as a Product Manager

[MUSIC] So let's jump in. So the first question at the highest level sometimes that I get from people is, you know, why does this thing called like a personal brand or a product manager brand matter? If I just do my job well and I accomplish the goals that my team has or, you know, I kind of keep maybe doing well and get a good performance reviews. You know, is that enough? And the thing is today, unfortunately, it's not enough. You know, that will certainly be a good thing. You should do well on your day-to-day job. But there are things you want to actively do to kind of build your brand. Right? You don't have all of the stats here, but, you know, people are changing their jobs every two or so years. Right? So you need to build a brand that's kind of bigger than your current company. You need to build a brand that helps you get to where you want to get in the future. That is noticed by people at other companies. So, you know, there's a few of the reasons why this personal brand matters and why it's, you know, kind of a newer topic in some ways, but it's kind of always been out there. But why you should, you know, take the time and invest in it and do a lot of the things we're going to be talking about today. But I really like this quote too. You know, Jeff Bezos of Amazon was speaking about, you know, brands in general, like his brand Amazon. Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. So if you just keep that in mind, and when you think about your personal brands, what do people say about you when you're not in the room? Do they know you're there? Do they talk about you positively? Do they highlight certain characteristics that you have? They talk about certain, you know, maybe weaknesses you have. What are those things that they're saying about you when you're not there? And believe it or not, you actually do have a lot of control over what those people say when you're not in the room. It's through the things you do. It's through the actions you take. It's through, you know, the investments you make in yourself and learning. And of course, you know, the quality that you deliver at work. But I thought this was kind of an apt quote to kind of start with today, especially as we kind of transition now into our personal brands. So, you know, on a few more reasons why brand matters. It is your reputation. You know, it kind of carries with you throughout your career. So things you did even a job or two in the past and people you worked with. They remember you. There's kind of a history there. And, you know, I found in technology, especially, and startups, especially, you tend to work with similar people, you know, people who know the same people, you know, companies that are related in some way sometimes even the actual same people, you know, years later. So kind of cultivating your brands, investing in your brand and your reputation is important. That's something you'll have for your entire working career. But maybe more importantly for the people on the webinar here. People who invest in their brand are typically the people I've seen move up in their careers faster. You know, again, if you just, you know, do a really great job in your day to day work, you'll move up. But the people who diversify their skills, the people who do things outside of work, the people who work on building that brand. And the people that you see, you know, every year, every two years, getting promoted, getting more responsibility, getting more visibility. That's the pattern I've seen now across four different companies in my career. So, you know, the people invest in their brands are typically the people who level up a bit quicker than everyone else. And so, you know, I mentioned before, you know, your brand is visible outside of your company, right? So, you know, the question I typically ask people I'm working with is, you know, on their brands, even if they're new in their career is like, what do people find when when they're actually looking for you online. You know, if they're looking for Alex Mitchell, what do they find? You know, are they finding, you know, maybe just my LinkedIn, okay, that's, that's all right. You know, maybe content I've written about products, you know, maybe that's a little bit better. Are they finding, you know, projects I've worked on, you know, maybe a product portfolio, maybe a speech I gave at a conference, you know, even better, right? So, you know, you want those people that are, you know, looking for you, you know, maybe you're considering a new job or your, you know, as I did myself recently moved to a new city and tried to kind of, you know, join that startup community. You want to make sure you, you know, you have a good presence out there that people can learn a lot about you and your brands, you know, with just a quick search in a few places that they're likely to look. So, we'll talk about a few things on that can help you improve there today with, with not a ton of effort. And then the last thing about your brands, you know, having that brand, you just heard me mention a few different things that could kind of be part of that brand. Now, having that brand is a signal to people out there that, you know, you care, you care about funding, you care about trying new things, you care about investing in yourself, and you care about how others, you know, see you out there in the world and what they find out about you. So, you know, it kind of makes this strong signal that demonstrates you care, right? All of these, you know, I don't want to kind of belabor this point here before we jump into some of the actual tactics, but I hopefully have convinced you that your brand does matter. It helps you get to the goals you want in your career, it helps other people see you, it helps, you know, kind of your, you know, people understand your reputation and shows you are a hard worker. So, what we're going to spend some time going through today now is a few of the different ways that you can invest in that brand of yours. So, how you can actually build that PM brand. But the first thing is before we jump in here, you don't have to do all of these things. This could certainly be overwhelming if you imagine, you know, at the end of this webinar, oh my god, I happen to do 10 things, I don't have the time in the day already for these things, how am I going to do all 10 of them consistently. You don't have to do that. So, I wanted to start with that. I'm going to give you a lot today, but try and keep in mind the two or three that really stand out to you that you have an interest in, you know, that kind of hit you when I say them, or when I share what I've learned about them or my personal experiences. You say, wow, you know, that's something I could do. I can imagine doing that for you know, a few months of time or, you know, X amount of hours a week, like I can do that. That's interesting to me. So, I want you to pay attention to your own reaction there. And, you know, kind of we're going to work together on finding those two to three that you really care about. Because what I found for myself and for others I've worked with is, you know, if you try and either do too many, you're not going to be able to juggle them all, you're not going to do a good job at it. And if you try and force yourself to do ones that you don't enjoy, we all know we can force ourselves to do something for a few weeks, you know, maybe a few months if we're really good. But eventually those habits are going to go away if we don't enjoy them. So you can't fake it for long, find the things you care about. You're going to get about 10, maybe even a few more today for me. So try and keep an eye or write down some notes on the two or three that really hit you that seem like things you could do. So the first one, the first one is one that I am a big believer in because I think there are a lot of really accessible ways to build your personal brand through writing. So, the first tip here is writing or contributing to blogs out there. So the pure why of it is is because it actually helps you learn. So you may think, you know, even if you're not a product manager today, you may think, you know, how can I possibly write about product, I don't work, you know, for a tech company, I'm not a product manager, if you're in that boat, you can still write about your reviews about products or things you loved about this new app or you know the five things you really enjoyed about this and the three things you didn't like. Even those types of content start getting you kind of versed in writing in the language of a product manager and help, you know, start putting yourself out there, start putting your thoughts out there, making you refine your ideas. And eventually, you know, this content starts to develop, you'll kind of find what's interesting, you know, I like writing about, you know, my example, new apps, you know, when new apps come out, I like to try him. The good things, the bad things, the cool technology, the bad technology, good design, bad design, whatever it is, you know, find that like me, that you're interested in and that you can write on somewhat consistently. So I'll talk about that more in a second, but it's pretty accessible, you know, you don't have to write really long things. And you know, a few easy ways to start if you have a company that has a blog, you know, reach out to that marketing person who runs the blog and see if you can write something for it. That's where I started originally about seven or eight years ago. I just wrote a few small blog posts for my company, you know, maybe a few hundred people saw them at most over the those years, but it was helpful for me starting to get some experience. It was helpful for me starting to get my name out there as someone thinking about these things. So writing for your company is actually a pretty straightforward way to start if you work for a smaller company. I know bigger companies, you may not be able to jump in right away. A few other ideas. Medium, mediums my go to place for writing. I think it brings a lot of really good tools for you. So, you know, as a new writer, it gives you a community out there of readers already so you don't have to bring them to your website. So medium is great for that. And then also if you write something popular, sometimes medium will kind of promote it for you. So they'll kind of publish it out there to people. They'll email them about it so they can kind of help you out there too. So medium is a great place to get started. And I would say another thing too, is if medium feels like the right fit, check out some writers out there. I mentioned myself here and reach out to them. See if you can collaborate them with them on a piece or help them write part of a new blog post. Kind of benefit from all the work they've done and start writing with them. So that's one of the couple of the hows you can do to kind of get into to medium. And so here are a few things I've learned from writing on medium specifically. So kind of keep in mind, it's not gonna all happen overnight. You're probably talking a few month commitment at least. I put three here and you're probably gonna want to write at least a couple times a month during that period. Ideally once a week. So if you can kind of do the math there, I'm talking six to 12 times your writing in that period. So again, as I mentioned before, think if that's something that's interesting to you, six to 12 times writing over three months. At that point, you can judge was the successful, am I getting some readership? Am I getting some of my name out there? And I mentioned, medium's a great shortcut for those reasons. And so a few other kind of tips here, pick some things that are topical or popular if those are interesting to you. So one big thing in the product community right now is product-led growth, where product can actually be a growth driver for startups and businesses. So that's a topic that a lot of people are looking for right now and is a good one to write on. And then another tip, make these easy to digest. Product people, tech people, readers in general today have very low patience. So you're probably likely to have more success if your posts are posts that can be read in five minutes. Definitely less than 10 minutes. Occasionally, you can definitely write something really long. But those are my tips for getting your posts read more, distributed more, for them to be more successful. So those are just a few of the little hacks I've learned about writing on medium. But if you start getting into medium and you want to collaborate with me in a post, feel free to reach out. So if medium's a little overwhelming, I put this one second for a reason. Sometimes medium, even that five-minute blog post could be a little much. If that feels like a lot of writing, go to Quora. So Quora, if you're unfamiliar, it's the place where a lot of people are asking questions, especially in the technical community, especially in the startup community, entrepreneurship community. And you may not think, especially if you're young in your career that you can answer a lot on Quora, but I think you'd be surprised. I found people I work with have a lot of things that they're passionate about, maybe very specific. That people are asking about on Quora that they can give a unique answer to, based on their backgrounds, research they've done, things they find interesting. And so don't sell yourself short. You can definitely go on Quora, spend maybe about 30 minutes, answering, let's say, like three or four questions. Maybe do that once or twice a week, again, commit to it for a little while. And before you know it, you'll see your answers starting getting read. You'll see your profile on Quora. Start to get a little bit more visibility, more traffic. And what's cool about Quora is they actually give you really good analytics. So I'll show you how many people are actually viewing your answers, how many people are then viewing your profile. So you kind of get to see very quickly are people actually noticing me? Are they finding my answers valuable? Is it helping my personal brand? So Quora, again, really low barrier to entry, very quick time. You could do it on your phone, of course, too. So check out Quora if medium is a little bit overwhelming on the writing side. And then on the other end of the spectrum, so if I could have ordered these right from smallest to largest, it would have been Quora, and then it would have been medium, maybe then a little bit of a gap, and then writing a book. So I've grouped these all together because they kind of fit in this theme of writing. So if you are really enjoying writing, I can't emphasize enough how transformative writing a book can be for your career. I'll talk about the level of effort and things I've learned in the second here. But I've written a couple books now at this point, and it is a massively successful way to just elevate your brand and position yourself out there if you do it well. It's also, I don't know how inspired you are by personal challenges or personal goals, or kind of New Year's resolutions or things like that. But kind of challenging yourself to collect all of your ideas. Maybe let's say you've written those blog posts for a few months on a theme. Now you have 12 blog posts kind of combining those together into the start of a book. Those are things that you can challenge yourself to do, but kind of give yourself also a shortcut with some of the things you've already written. And so kind of by doing this, by creating a book, you really can position yourself well above other candidates out there for jobs. You can get people interested in you that are around the world that you've never met before and really build a lot of positive relationships. And what's cool is writing a book is, I'm not going to sell it short. It's not the easiest thing you can do out there, but it's gotten a lot easier in the past like five or so years. So I've linked a few resources here that, again, I'm going to share this after the webinar, but there are services like Kindle Direct Publishing from Amazon or even scribe writing, which is a startup that helps independent authors actually publish their first books that try and make this a lot easier than it used to be. Give you the organization, give you the formula, give you a lot of help along the way so you don't feel alone. And again, as I mentioned at the beginning, this is certainly one thing I'm happy to provide some more advice on after the webinar. If there is a book you're working on or one you consider, even a few months from now, think of me, reach out. I can help you avoid some of the challenges I had and really make sure it's targeted well. It hits the mark and helps your personal brand. So I've written two books, as I mentioned. One, the first one there below building digital products. I wrote that a little bit more than five years ago now, maybe five years. That was to help product managers, kind of with a handbook that I wish I had as a product manager. And then the second one that I released about eight months ago now is at the end of 2019 is disrupting yourself, which is all about figuring out the way to consistently learn, consistently level up, consistently improve your brand, as we're talking about today. And I would say, if I've learned a couple of things from these two books, don't do it for the money. The money, maybe eventually you'll make a little bit of money from it or if you're very lucky, you'll become a best seller, but really don't get into it for that. You're gonna get into it for the reason of collecting your thoughts as I mentioned before, improving your brand, and honestly writing about something you care about. So I mentioned that at the beginning today. All of these things only work if you really care about them and you can stick with them. So don't do it for the money, do it because you have a passion. But the thing, a couple of other things I've learned from these books is you will be very surprised at the benefits that come from writing a book. You can't forecast them all ahead of time. You can't write them down on bullet points and do like a cost-benefit analysis of writing a book. It's an investment of time. Right, I have it in the bottom here. It's about six months of time. If you're very focused, I'm talking five to 10 hours a week to basically do everything from writing to editing, to publishing to promoting. It's about that amount of effort. That's a lot of hours if you add it up. But there are these unexpected benefits. And so that would be certain benefits like getting invited to speak at conferences, kind of introductions to other companies. Even the people you currently work with, when they hear that you wrote a book, they're gonna elevate your brand for you. They're gonna be like, wow, I'll spend a lot of time really putting the other thoughts. That's really cool. I can tell he's passionate about that. That's cool. And then the unexpected benefit of just hearing from people who enjoyed the book, who were helped by it. And again, this is one of just the coolest things out there. I would say maybe at least once or twice a week, I just get kind of random contacts from people out there who have read one of these books. They tell me a story, how it helped them. That is so cool. It's hard to put a value on that. But just being able to help people is a nice side benefit in addition to elevating your brand. So those are just a few of the things you can do in this writing bucket of improving your brand. So that was kind of the first theme, those three options. Kind of in terms of a next theme, we have kind of speaking and sharing what you've learned in maybe a more presentation style format. So in the non-COVID world, speaking at meetups meant actually going to physical meetups and presenting to a group like the one we see in the picture here and teaching others what you know. So whether that's a quick talk, five, 10 minutes, whether it's 45 minutes, it's sharing something that you know. And so huge benefits here. for connecting with like-minded people. You know, if they saw the topic you were sharing on, you know, when they signed up for the event, they're certainly interested in it. They're probably interested in learning more about you, they're interested in learning more about the industry, or talking about the industry. So the opportunity to find a lot of people like you very quickly is very high at meetups. And you have the opportunity to play the teacher. Even if you're junior in your career, that's a pretty powerful thing. You know, maybe people at that meetup who, you know, have been working in the same career for 15, 20 years are very senior. And you maybe fresh out of college or, you know, in your first job, you get to present to them. That's not a common thing at companies. And so meetups can kind of flip the script there, a little bit, which is cool. And so, you know, kind of the ways that I've found to tell them like this opportunity for yourself and build your brand. First, obviously, just start kind of attending meetups. And we'll talk about remote meetups in a second here. But start signing up for them and start, you know, being a member, an engaged member, right? So ask questions, you know, virtually, you know, engage with the presenters, engage with the organizers. And after you've attended for a little bit, you know, reach out to the organizer and, you know, thank them for the meetup. Of course, you know, build that relationship. And then propose them a topic that seems like a fit. So once you've learned about what's successful with that meetup, once you know your personal skills. And what, you know, could be interesting for that meetup, propose a topic, you know, just share something with them that you could speak on and see if they're interested in it. You know, I've done this many times in my career. I think, you know, almost without exception, the meet the organizers will be interested in the topic or some version of it. And if they aren't, you can, you can move on. But, you know, it's a great way to get your brand out there and to really, again, you know, flip the script a bit if you are a junior person. And so, you know, the world has changed. Right. So, you know, meetups are no longer, at least for now, like that, that meetup I just shared a picture of. But the cool thing about, you know, kind of meetups during this time, where they're online is I think the bar, you know, has gotten even a little bit lower. It's easier to speak at meetups now than it was before. Right before they sometimes required, oh, can you show me, you know, some experience you've had at meetups. I hear that occasionally or speaking to groups or tell me more about yourself. Now, there are so many emerging groups on so many people starting meetups. So, I just, you know, I linked one down here, this remote product one that I spoke at very, very new, like just started up in the past couple months. And so, those people are looking for presenters. They're looking for content. They're looking for people to share what they've learned. And they're very eager to build their brand too. So, you can just go on meetup, you can go on a few different sites out there, like meetup and find these new and emerging groups that are eager to grow, that are eager to promote you as a path to that growth. And so, those are great places to start. And honestly, if this one speaks to you, as I mentioned at the beginning, if this one speaks to you, do this even now as I'm talking or after the webinar, go check out some of those emerging meetup groups. The cool thing is, right, the meetup doesn't have to be near you, right? We're all remote pretty much everyone is remote these days. So, you can, you know, speak, in this case, I was speaking to a UK meetup. I hadn't done that before COVID. So, a lot of emerging opportunities. The thing I would also hint at here is similar to medium. You know, check out what topics are popular. You know, what are the groups or the events for those groups that are getting a lot of signups. You know, especially, you know, in the last month, like what are the most popular things that they're getting people to turn out for? And look at your own skills and see if you can find some overlap there. So, of course, remote work is popular now and, you know, ways to kind of improve that. But some other ones that you may not think of things about avoiding burnout, right? People are sick of going on a lot of Zoom calls. They're sick of, you know, kind of kind of being in glitch the computer all day at home. So, what are tactics that people can use to avoid burnout when they're, you know, at home and feeling isolated and even career transitions. You know, so I'm talking from the United States. We've had a lot of unemployment lately. A lot of people losing their job. So, you know, if you have experience there or can share tips or tricks about career transitions, that's a very hot topic now. So, kind of find those popular topics. There's emerging groups. And really, you know, the opportunity is out there for you. I can almost guarantee you can find a couple of meetups that you could speak at the next month or two. You know, for 30 minutes or so and get a good amount of people to turn out, especially if you choose a popular topic. So, this one's really accessible and especially if you don't enjoy writing and you like talking more. This one can, can definitely be for you and help you build your brand. A few things I've learned from virtual meetups and even other webinars I've done is, you know, if you're actually putting together your content, don't be afraid to promote yourself a little bit. You know, one to two minutes is probably about right anymore. You're looking a little too promotional, but the whole point of it right that we've talked about is building your brand. So, make sure you introduce yourself, the company you work for, if there's some place you want people to learn more about you, mention that, whether that's a website or LinkedIn, whatever it is or your portfolio. Don't be afraid to do that. That's, that's not bad. You've earned it. You're putting effort in, you know, to making this content into sharing this content. So, promote yourself a little bit. And promote where people can learn more if they like your content. And then the other thing is, is make sure that the event organizers are including a little bit of a right up on you in the event right up and also a follow up after the event. This is not too much to ask, you know, again, that same information, maybe even you shared verbally, make sure it's in the event details, make sure those links are in the event details and that follow up is two. It's kind of surprising, but one of the things I found is I've spoken at conferences and years later, I'll still see, you know, those, those event pages on, you know, showing up on the first, your second page of Google. And then people clicking through and then going and watching the YouTube video of it. And so, those things can be very long lived. So, make sure you get some, some important content on there about you. That will help you kind of again, build your brand. Another good one is product school. So, you know, obviously the theme of this webinar was promoting your product brand. Product school is actually really good about helping product managers, even if they don't go to school with them, promote their brands. So, I've engaged with product school a few times. I put a few links here in the deck that you'll see later, but they could be as little as I'm asking me anything, which is, you know, just a slack conversation in their channel for about 30 minutes for your answering questions. And then, you know, I've got a lot of other product managers or aspiring product managers are asking all the way up to talks, you know, all the way up to, you know, meet up type talks. So, there's a lot of different opportunities to engage with product school. And they're very, very welcome to people sharing information with them or sharing what they've learned. They're always looking for people in the, in the field, there are people who have something to share with their students or prospective students. They're always looking for that content. And so, they're very hungry. So, if you have something you can share with them, they will likely be very receptive. And then, you get the great opportunity to also engage with other PMs out there. So, you know, product school is obviously a collection of product managers and people who want to become product managers. So, if you're looking, you know, even for changes in your career or looking to break into products, it's a great community to be a part of and great to start to meet some of those people. So, there's a lot you can do with product school. I've learned a lot through working with them over the past three years or so. And they've helped a lot. And, and I'm still, I think out there on the website, and a bunch of places, which, which helps me as well and helps building my brand. Another thing in addition to the product school, you can do is, is volunteering as a mentor. And so, this one's almost a little counterintuitive, right? We're talking about all of these other things you can do where you go out there and talk or present or create content. This one maybe feels a little bit different, but it's just as valuable. And so, you know, there's a bunch of sites out there now. I've linked a few growth mentor, mentor crews. There's even a few other ones where you can go and list yourself as a mentor. And again, you know, the bar is not incredibly high here. You know, I kind of going back to what I said on Quora, you have something you can share with others. And so, so check out those site and really, you know, by helping other product people, you know, they give you reviews. You know, potentially with some of these, you can make a little bit of money, but it's really not about the money. You're really learning about how to help other product people with challenges. You're spreading your personal brands, they review you, your profile, it gets elevated. And really, you're helping, you know, learn about, you know, different challenges out there. So, what I found through this mentorship, you can also kind of flip the mentor mentee relationship. And you can share a lot of the challenges you're encountering. So a lot of the things, you know, you're struggling with with a personal, you know, brand building things or professional product challenges. And so, you can help you just as much as you can help them. The other side of this coin is, you know, check out these sites for more mentorship. So specifically, I think I always get these mixed up, but I think growth mentor is completely free. for some amount of usage. So if you want to go talk to a product leader at some company, some cool tech company out there, go check out Growth Mentor. Find that person, get 30 minutes with them, you know, bring a bunch of great questions and you know, they could even be about brand building, like we're talking about today and they will be able to help you out. So both sides here, both volunteering as a mentor, sharing what you've learned, building your profile in that way, but don't hesitate to reach out to other people who can mentor you. So yeah, you'll find me on listed on both of those sites, but you know, this is something you can definitely do for yourself too and you can help others. So volunteering a little bit counterintuitive, but gets your presence out there helps people find you when they're searching for you on Google or in other ways. So you know, I've kind of already hit on a few of these things already, but this is just I think my mentor cruise profile or growth mentor profile, but it really just makes you more adaptable, more, you know, sharp, better presenting yourself in interviews because you've now had a bunch of skills helping other people solving their product challenges. So it's definitely something you can do to really level up your personal skills as well as get your name out there. And then you can go kind of old school. So, you know, while while that mentoring was, you know, a little bit new school, you know, you can meet people for, you know, now it's a virtual coffee, but, you know, back in the day or maybe in the future are real coffee. And so I've linked coffee here because I actually wrote a whole post about this. And I went back and looked and I think it was over the past two years I did more than a hundred coffees with people. And what I found is, you know, that investment of 30 minutes with a person, you know, in a, you know, maybe company that you're interested in or a job that you just want to learn more about. Or, you know, just something you really find interesting. It's hard to put a price on that. It's so valuable to both build a connection, you know, someone that can maybe help introduce you to someone else or someone who can directly help you. You know, that can answer some of those questions as your mentor. You know, and make sure, I guess, when you're doing this, one of the things that always keep in mind is you want to make sure you're helping them too. It should not be a one-sided thing. But, you know, together, you know, just imagine, you know, take a pause for a second here. Imagine if over the next two years you met a hundred people that you were interested in, at companies you're interested in, in jobs you're interested in. Like imagine that the value of that network and how those people could help you find your next job or find your next better job. Or even if you get into a bad place and you know, maybe lose a job, help you land softly somewhere. Again, it's hard to put a value on that time. And, you know, what I found is the recipe is not that crazy here, especially in technology. And in the little bit more, the startup world, people want to help. So, you know, what I found in this case is, you know, sometimes having some connection in the person helps. So whether you're living in the same city, or maybe you went to the same college, or any type of connection can help a little bit. And, you know, just trying to reach out to them on LinkedIn with a nice note about what you found interesting about them. You know, would they be open to a quick call? It might even be a 10-minute call, a 15-minute call to talk through some things you're working through or some questions you have. That is, you know, maybe, and I found in my career, you know, you could probably get 25 to 50% success rate. Of course, when you get some people, you don't get responses on, but just ask nicely. You're going to get a surprising amount of yeses. They're going to get a some, a surprising amount of people who will give you 10, 15, 20 minutes of their time, you know, regardless of their position to help you. And then from there, again, make sure you give them value, make sure, you know, you offer to help them in whatever way you can and build from there. You know, ask who they can introduce you to, or they feel comfortable introducing you to, ask how you can help them. Incredibly valuable. Check out that article if you want some more tips and tricks on how to pull that one off. But I've learned a lot from those coffees. They've actually unlocked a few of my jobs for me as I move between them and my career. And so we've talked a lot about different ways you can present, whether it's meetups, whether that's product school, the biggest one, similar to, you know, the big one on the writing side where we talked about books. On the speaking side, it's conferences. And so conferences, as I mentioned earlier, it's just a very, very visible, you know, place to elevate your brand to, to elevate your name to, to position yourself as an expert on something. And, you know, you have the opportunity to kind of instantly help hundreds of people, which is pretty cool as well. So kind of a lot of benefits from the conferences. But what I would say, of course, the bar is a little bit higher here. And so a few of the ways you can, you know, work towards speaking at a conference is, you know, start by kind of building your, your speaking skills, your presenting skills at meetups. So again, you know, today's virtual world, you know, present at two, three, four meetups, you know, get the recordings of those. And then, you know, I've linked in a lot of product conferences here. Look at ones that are interesting to you. And often these conferences have open pitches for speakers or open applications for speakers. Take some of that content you've created for those meetups, maybe some of those recordings you have, you know, put them in that application and apply to speak at some of those conferences. And the cool thing is, you know, a conference might seem really overwhelming, right? Like, I don't know if I'm ready to be that guy up on stage here talking about, I think this is the Airbnb experiences. I don't know if I'm ready to do that, right? That's a big step. The cool thing about conferences is they also have the ability to start a little bit smaller. So you can be at a, you know, side stage, you can be at a breakout session, a workshop, a million different options. So as you check out that list of those conferences, I, I, what there you'll see a lot of those different options. And then the other cool thing here too is, you know, again, I mentioned with meetups, the bar has gotten lower and, you know, there's demand for more content. With conferences, there are a lot of new conferences emerging right now. The bar has gotten lower. It's more accessible for more junior people to speak at conferences or to find more specific conferences because they don't need to get a big venue. They're just putting it online. So you can even with a year or two years of experience be speaking at a conference to hundreds of people, I guarantee it. And so if this is something that interests you, you know, the speaking, work your way up with meetups, develop some content and some confidence and start applying to these conferences. And before you know it, you will be speaking to to bigger crowds and really elevating your brand out there even more. And then another one speaking oriented is podcast. So you may not have thought of this one. And maybe you have because you might enjoy podcasts yourself, but creating one might seem like this, this big thing that you have to do that you have to hire people for or you don't have editing experience. But honestly, you know, there's there are great websites out there and I'm going to really promote this one, you know, because I've used it and it's been really great for me is anchor.fm. So if you find yourself, you know, again, not enjoying writing as much, but like talking more, like interviewing people more, you know, whether that's leaders or peers, podcasts could be a great option for you. You know, podcasts are insanely popular right now. They're growing very fast. And again, a pretty low effort way, you know, potentially spending 30 minutes an hour of time and then getting content out there, you know, to many different places for people to consume. And also with something like anchor.fm, what's really cool is they create a website for you. They kind of do it all for you. Would they distribute it to iTunes, to Spotify, everywhere people listen to podcasts automatically for free. It's a really great product if this is appealing to you. So so definitely check it out. And again, how to get started. Like don't overthink it. You know, come up with, you know, maybe a simple name for your podcast and do what's interesting to you. So again, you know, maybe it's interviewing other product people. Maybe it's just talking about one of those popular issues. Maybe it's talking about personal experiences you're having with a career search or with a product search. All of those things can be very interesting to people out there. And again, it gets your name out there. And so anchor.fm does kind of it all. It'll let you edit. It'll let you produce. Let you distribute all for free. So if this is interesting to you, check out anchor. And here are a few things I've learned. So, you know, I have this modern product manager podcast out there that I started a couple of months back. One of the cool things is you can, you know, if you make something in one place, so I'd say you make a blog or you make a YouTube video, it's really easy to also make a podcast on it. So anchor makes it really easy to upload a YouTube video. Or if you have a blog, you can just have a blog open in one window and you can talk about maybe some of the themes of that blog, you know, for 10 minutes. And then guess what, you have a podcast episode. So that would be one of the things. Don't duplicate, just basically, you know, syndicate your content, save yourself a little bit of time. Another tip is to, you know, find something that's that's a little bit unique, a little bit interesting out there. Popular topics are great too, but also maybe there are things that haven't gotten talked about. So kind of balance the popular and the niche topics. And then, you know, of course, link your content together. So, you know, link your website, link your LinkedIn, whatever. it is that you have, you can do that in your descriptions, you can do that in your details, as you can see, I've linked in minor product manager courses. So I've learned quite a few things from podcasting, but it's actually a lot easier than you might imagine. So this is kind of one of the secrets I want to get out there to everyone. And then the last one I wanted to share, so number 10 here is joining Slack groups. So you may have Slack groups for work, you may be actually a member hopefully of a few of these out there, but Slack groups are a great place to find these really passionate people and discussions and channels to jump in on, and really other product people out there to talk with. So I've just kind of linked in here, you'll see these product Slack communities on the left, but I've linked it for you. You know, join a few of these that are interesting. You can start answering questions that people have, start building your own brand there. But what's really cool about these groups is almost all of them have like a good reads channel or like content channel or, you know, shameless promotion channel. They call it different things, but I've actually been able to use those a lot for sharing my medium posts, for sharing my YouTube videos, even sharing podcasts, as I just mentioned. It's a great way to find, you know, in many cases, tens of thousands of people who are interested in the content you're making. So a really good way to actually start promoting, but also to start helping the community building your brands, you know, being recognized as a leader in those communities. So and then, you know, the way to kind of transfer that to once you've built those connections in the Slack group, start connecting with those people on LinkedIn, right? If there are some cool companies that are out there, you know, find those people in these Slack groups, you know, ask those people in the DM a couple of questions. A great way to kind of break the ice to, you know, kind of connect as a, you know, on a pretty low risk level with the person. And then, you know, after you've chatted with them for a bit, you know, that LinkedIn connection that they get from you, not going to seem weird. Like they will then help you. They'll maybe then jump on a call with you at some point. You can kind of build up from from this Slack level up to something, you know, more, more significant, more, more tight with those people. And so Slack groups definitely a great entry point, definitely a great place to start building your brand. So those are a lot of different kind of channels that you can create content in ways you can start promoting your brand. I just want to talk about a few tools that I found especially helpful. I obviously mentioned one of them already with anchor.fm. So a podcast or for you, check that one out. A few other ones in here that have been especially helpful for me that I can't pump up enough. One is brand yourself. So brand yourself essentially will help you track your presence on Google. And you can see even just from the screenshot over here, you know, you plug in your name, you're able to submit all of the content that you have. So, you know, every time you're in a new meetup group or an event page or you write a blog post, you basically can add it to brand yourself. It'll track that post. It'll tell you if it shows up on Google. It'll tell you, you know, what else is showing up on Google about Alex Mitchell. So you can see my LinkedIn here, but there are eight other things I think in the first 10 pages of Google. And so it's a great way to kind of quantitatively track your brand building progress. So if you're all about data, you're all about numbers and graphs, brand yourself definitely helps with that and just makes it a lot less manual to track your progress. So I've been using them for years now. It's kind of one of those again, a secret tool, but I feel like not enough people know about, but very, very helpful for tracking your progress. Another one that I think people don't put enough kind of investment into because they might think these things are a little out of date, but honestly, I think it's another little bit of a secret out there with LinkedIn and Facebook groups. I've linked here, you know, 30, but there are many more out there, but I picked kind of 30 top ones to share with all of you guys on LinkedIn and Facebook. And those are great places similar to the Slack channel to both participate and answer others questions and help them, but also amazing places to share your content. It's not unusual for me, for example, with like a medium post on a popular topic. If I hit a cord with people that are interested in that topic to get, you know, thousands of viewers that come from these LinkedIn groups and these Facebook groups. You know, I just post the link, post the content to, you know, it sounds like a lot of groups, but you can do 30 pretty quickly. And if it's the right post, and if I've been a good member of that group and if I've helped people and I'm known in that group, people will click through and they'll check out that content. So you don't want to be spammy, of course, but these are great places to build your brand and to share and to get people engaged in your content. So I think these are overlooked a lot. So don't discount them. They can be super helpful for building your brand. Couple other quick kind of ones that I want to share to kind of growth hack your brand. You know, Twitter, if Twitter is for you, definitely use something like tweet deck to basically spend only a little bit of time each month and automate your tweets out there for the month. So if you're a free tool, if you write some of this content or you produce some videos or podcasts, it's really easy to go into tweet deck and say, hey, post this every Wednesday at 9 a.m. for four weeks. And think about Twitter, right? Like everything goes away pretty quickly. And so you kind of have to have strategies like this where you're promoting content multiple times. And what's cool is, again, you can really spend 30 minutes. You could probably get 50 tweets set for an entire month and then you only have to do it once a month. So really helpful, again, gets people to come back to your content to keep seeing it that type of thing. So if Twitter is for you and you find that interesting, check out tweet deck if you don't have a tool already for helping there. Another final tool that I would recommend that I feel like not a lot of people are taking advantage of to build their brand and make their content look better is Canva. So Canva is a really dead simple design tool that you can use for everything from your YouTube thumbnails to your podcast images. Have you go for podcasts to your medium posts to your social posts? And they just make it so easy to make content that what's really professional, really good to give you great themes to choose from. Again, in about a few minutes, you'll have something that is ready to share. So Canva is another kind of growth hack tool for your brand that will help you elevate your brand very, very quickly. And then the last one here too is, again, I know I've shared a lot today, but again, hopefully you have those two to three things in mind that are the ones that you're more interested in. Once you've kind of decided on those two or three things, so whether it's speaking at meetups or writing a medium or a quora, think about the places you can distribute to, think about the things you need to do every time you create a piece of content. I can share this actually after the webinar. I didn't link it in here, but I have like 10 steps I go through for every post I write. And it sounds silly, but it makes it actually quicker and easier to stick with writing. So every time I write a post, I publish it to here to those LinkedIn groups. I publish it to Facebook. I add it to a publication on Medium and other steps. I add it to Tweak Deck. Really helpful to kind of have that distribution checklist. And then also really helpful to have a content calendar. So again, if you, one of these things appeals to you more than another, think of different ideas and add them to a list out there. So you'll have ideas randomly, oh, I should write about this topic in product or this topic in career development, write it down on that content calendar. And then every week or every other week when you go and sit down to write, pick the idea that excites you most from that content calendar and write about that. So I already have this pool of ideas. And then once you're done writing, you already have the mechanism to place it to distribute it to you. You already have your playbook. It helps a lot. I didn't learn this for a few years and I wish I had because it sounds so simple. But if you're not doing this, you're either sitting there thinking, what should I write? What topics, interesting, is your wasting time there or you're not distributing your content out there to all the places where people could see it. And you know what, you only get 100 readers instead of 1000. So these things really help. These are great practices to kind of start if you're kind of on this content creation journey and you're just getting started. Start with these. They definitely help a time. So transitioning a little bit here. One question I got as I was promoting this webinar that I wanted to address. And I'm looking at the clock here too. We're in the last couple of slides here. So hang with me here and then we'll get to the questions. It's kind of creating a separate brand. So you know, you may have noticed, right, I have this whole separate brand, the modern product manager. Did you go and create a whole separate brand? I would say probably not for now. Wait until you have some momentum. Wait until you have some content. What are the question I ask is what are the things that that brand is going to do that you can't do yourself. So I would say get your personal brand in really great shape first. And then if you are really, you know, firing on all cylinders, you're really moving along well, then invest in, you know, a sale. separate brand. And the reason I did the modern product managers because I had YouTube channels, blog posts, podcasts, medium, you know, posts on other sites, courses, you know, even just hearing me say that it's overwhelming, I needed something that kind of grouped it all together. But it took me years to get to that. Maybe it'll be faster than me with a few of these tips, but I would say don't worry about creating a brand separate from yourself right when you first get started. So that's my recommendation there. Just want to kind of address that because they were definitely some questions I got about that, especially because I kind of have this newer brand out there these days. And then the last thing I wanted to end with is just one tiny warning about your personal brand. So I mentioned as I was talking about meetups or even conferences, promoting yourself a little bit is good, but you know, don't over promote. I think a lot of people worry about this more than they should just because kind of this personal brand building doesn't come naturally. It's kind of weird to talk about yourself and kind of hype up yourself a little bit right and say I did all these things. So it makes some people uncomfortable. So, you know, I think most people are actually a little worried about this, you know, too much. It's very rare. But what I would say is it's not a bad thing to have in the back of your mind. You know, again, I promoted myself at the beginning of this even for a minute or two. That's about right. You know, promote yourself, you know, in those Facebook and LinkedIn groups a little bit, but most of the time be giving value back to people. You want to be sharing a lot more value than you're promoting yourself. But even if you're thinking about this, you're probably okay. You probably don't need to be worried about excessive self promotion. So I wanted to end with a quote. So we started with a quote. We will end with a quote. So, you know, kind of hard to build and easy to destroy. You know, it takes 20 years to build their reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently. So from from Warren Buffett, the prolific investor. And so, you know, again, just harping on how important brands are, right? It's this thing. You're going to hopefully invest in for your entire life, your personal brand. But don't sell it short. Don't jeopardize it. Don't take shortcuts. Really that that could risk that brand. It's not worth it. Almost all of the time. It does only takes a very little amount to ruin that brand, where it takes a lot of effort over time to build that brand. So this one thing to kind of keep in mind about the importance of brand. Hi, this is Alex Mitchell taking a quick break from the content to tell you about the modern product manager. If you're enjoying this content, you will definitely enjoy what you're going to find at the modern product manager. It's a collection of free resources for product managers, aspiring product managers, and really anyone interested in technology. You can find content from the modern product manager on YouTube in a great weekly newsletter, a blog, free interview questions, and much, much more. Check it out at themodernproductmanager.com. And I'm sure you'll enjoy the content you're going to find there.