I’m unemployed now, and you know what that means: time to try to establish a “personal brand!” I understand that advice and it makes sense in a way, but everything inside me screams whenever I think about sharing my thoughts with the internet. It’s why this blog is sporadic at best – my “brand” is not as a “thought leader” or anything like that. I’m not going write the next viral post on LinkedIn challenging the status quo or pointing out hypocrisy.

Attempting to define my “brand” as a product manager has been challenging. I feel like everyone is looking for some rock star product manager who should really be a company CEO who can come up with a brilliant product idea based on their excellent market knowledge and get their team to build it perfectly and market it like a champion and see it through from conception to release and do it all over again. My short-lived experiences with product management so far have shown me, though, that this is not me. I am not excited by creating new things.

(And, half the recruiters for companies I’ve applied to just left my website and turned down my application. What kind of product manager doesn’t like creating new things?)

What excites me is working behind the scenes to de-tangle problematic processes and make things run more smoothly over time. My ideal job would be as a product manager for software infrastructure, especially if it’s a thorny legacy product with loads of tech debt (oh baby). I tried the whole “be the product manager for a brand new, strategically critical product” and let me tell you, it did not work out that well for me. I like solving problems, not innovating. When you’re creating a brand new product that leadership is betting the company on, the only problem to solve is “how do we get this out the door faster,” and that’s a shitty situation for everybody.

Throw me at your tech debt or internal processes. Let me sink my teeth into the problems and talk to everyone on the team about what works and what doesn’t. I’ll suss out the problems and iteratively work towards solving them and making everything smoother and easier for everybody. I don’t want to be the product manager front-and-centre at conferences demo-ing new features, I want to be the person who enabled the infrastructure improvements that made that new feature not fall over in production.

These jobs are a bit harder to find, though. It’s hard for a company to know when they need somebody to do that work; it’s often “glue work” that gets picked up by people in other roles. And a job listing that says “inherit our technical debt and make it less gross” is much less sexy than “build a new product and see the lifecycle through from start to finish!”

So, my brand: solver of thorny problems, champion of easily-understood-and-repeated processes. If that sounds like something you could use at your company, hit me up, I am very available.