Tips for PM Brand Building

The following are tips for PMs looking to build thier brand as they level up their career.

1. Self-Reflection - Your User Manual: Write a one-page user manual, it can help you start to build your brand statement by reflecting on your strengths and weaknesses. I have been doing this for years, and most people who read it love it. 

2. Tell Me About Yourself: Using your brand statement during job interviews or listening tours. Practice introducing yourself using your brand statement, followed by three examples of how you have lived your brand in your career. You need to do it all in 90 seconds. It will help you be concise. 

3. Thought Leadership: You should start writing about product management. Start with your own medium.com account. Then pitch stories to PM blogs on medium.

4. Managing Upwards: Being seen by executives in your company helps you build your brand. One of the most important things you can do to manage upwards is to set expectations with your manager BEFORE you get frustrated. Do it at the beginning of a new role. Here is a tool for getting on the same page with your manager about your skills. 

5. Understanding Your Manager's Goals: A client asked about being in a manager's skip or your skip's skip's orbit. Step one in that process is understanding your manager and organization's goals and pains and addressing them. Become someone they naturally want to meet or know because you are solving their problems. This starts by actively empathizing with your manager and what drives them. (Get motivate: How to run meetings with executives)

6. Using LinkedIn to Build Your Brand: A nice piece on LinkedIn. Or this one with 6 Tips on the topic. 

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More On Writing

Here are some suggestions to get you started writing articles and getting published to help build your brand.

• Leverage Medium.com. You can publish whenever you want.

• Write a guest blog and share it on LinkedIn.

• Or better yet, get warmed up by writing about a topic on LinkedIn.

For your article, you can pick any topic: How to do X?, 3 most important X for PMs... Think of anything you know well or get complimented on.

Here is a simple example of a piece each of you can write, reflect on your history and what has influenced you as a PM. 

Open Article/Podcast Challenge 

If you have read the far, I invite you to be interviewed by me about a topic of your choosing. Pitch me an article or podcast topic at: wendy-lynn@intrico.io.