Building Personal and Organizational Prestige §
Highlights §
- I’ve come to believe that the value of brand building is overemphasized, but that the impact of enhancing prestige is underrated, and that there’s a relatively straightforward playbook to increase your personal and organizational prestige. (View Highlight)
- The distinctions between building prestige, building brand, and building an audience (View Highlight)
- Deciding whether it’s valuable to build your personal and engineering brands (View Highlight)
- The playbook to manufacture prestige with a small quantity of high-quality content (View Highlight)
- Pitfalls of measuring prestige, and what to measure instead (View Highlight)
- Sometimes you’ll hear an argument that personal brand is important for engineering executives because they play an important role in external communication, but in practice that’s fairly uncommon. (View Highlight)
- . When this does happen, it’s generally done by a founding CTO, such as Honeycomb’s Charity Majors, who has been very successful in using her considerable reach to create visibility for the company (View Highlight)
- most companies bring in specialists to lead external communication roles. If they’re trying to generate more marketing qualified leads, then they’ll likely want Marketing to lead that. If they’re trying to increase product sign ups, then they’ll likely want either Developer Relations or Growth teams to own that. (View Highlight)
- Engineering brand is a bit different, as it’s generally viewed as a priority because of its impact on Engineering hiring, rather than being a central business function. In such cases, efforts are usually steered from within Engineering itself. Things get a bit messier at companies that sell to developers, and these efforts might fall anywhere within Engineering or Marketing at such companies. (View Highlight)
- my experience is that few of the most successful folks I know are well-known online, and many of the most successful folks I know don’t create content online at all. (View Highlight)
- In your engineering leadership career, you will at times be immersed in the message that you need to be creating content to be successful, but there’s abundant evidence to the contrary. You absolutely don’t have to do this sort of thing. (View Highlight)
- Similarly, most Engineering organizations spend little time developing their external brand, and are not externally well-known (View Highlight)
- Many of those silent organizations are doing very interesting work, they just don’t spend much time talking about it publicly. You can, without a doubt, be a successful engineering organization without ever doing any external communication to build your brand. (View Highlight)