Before I start, I want to give credit to Lisa Kostova for inspiring me to write this article. In her October 11th newsletter, she addressed an overlooked strategy for career opportunities: leveraging industry, vertical and stage of the company when talking about yourself. (If you are looking for help building your LinkedIn brand, Lisa is great.)

I have been talking about building your brand as part of your introduction. I try to keep it free form so that people focus on building a unique brand, not a cookie-cutter one. But that doesn’t always work. When reading Lisa’s newsletter this morning, I decided it was a good idea to talk about how you can use the FLIVS model to jumpstart your brand statement development.

Let’s dive in…

Your professional brand, that highlights your experience, can be described by the FLIVS framework:

• Function

• Level

• Industry

• Vertical

• Stage of Company

Now, let’s break it down before we put it all together.

We all have the function covered: Product Management.

Level can be a slight bit dicier because some companies are stingy with titles and others hand it out like candy. But generally, recruiters search for titles.

Industry

Think:

• Health Care

• Transportation

• Education

• Real Estate

• Food

• Retail

• Entertainment

Here is a list of 52 industries.

Verticals:

• AI/ML

• Mobile

• Personalization Engine

• Search

• API Integrations

• Hardware

• B2B, B2C, B2B2C

When I worked at Google, I owned the local search vertical (think hair salons and oil changes). Other teams owned: health, travel, weather, etc.

Stage:

• Start-Up

  • Pre-seed Stage - testing

  • Seed Stage - venture capital

• Growth Stage

• Expansion

• Mature

• Renewal or Decline

To dive in a little more, here are some quick links:

• 7 Business Stages Relative to Investing

• 5 Stages of Business Growth

• 5 Stages of Business Growth

Example:
At its most basic, you can use this as a fill-in-the-blank guide that goes something like this:

• I am a director of product who is experienced in optimizing solutions at mature marketplace technology companies, specializing in personalization and search solutions.

• I am a lead product manager experienced in launching and optimizing platforms at marketplace companies. I have extensive experience working on model development and algorithm optimization for personalization and search platforms.

You get the picture. Pay around with it. Then start to own what works for being found.

To learn how to apply this concept to your LinkedIn profile, check out slides 12 and 13 in Lisa’s post.