[Research Note] Brand 🤜🤛 Rituals
Thanks Ada, for teaching me how to build and manage my brand through rituals!
That's the beginning of my journey researching how to effectively manage up, down, and sideways. These articles are actually just notes I'm hoping to develop into something bigger later on. If you know someone who's a pro at this, or if you have any resource suggestions on managing up and sideways – drop a hint in the comments!
Once we move past the senior-level roles, we have a whole new thing to work on. It's about managing relationships with those around us. There are short articles on how to find common ground with your manager, such as how to be reliable by
. There are long guides covering different aspects of how you work with stakeholders, and then there are books talking about how to obtain power covering even more aspects.While it seems like a complex topic, there’s no need to learn all of those things at the same time.
In reality, it comes to a series of small steps that layer on top of each other. Those layers create a system that we can leverage then to support us on our way up.
In today’s note, I want to share a ritual that can be foundational to that system. I learned about it from the amazing Ada Chen whom I recommend to every professional I meet. Ada, your insight generation per minute is off the charts. Can't wait to work with you again!
This ritual is built around your personal brand in a work setting. Here, we operate under the assumption that the personal brand helps build power within the organization, and that power is what makes us get what we want. So, if brand correlates with us getting promotion, then we have a few questions to answer:
What is my personal brand?
How do I demonstrate it?
You'll want to build a brand around your company values, so there’s no conflict between the two. Different companies have different power centers. For instance, at Instagram, designers often call the shots. At Vimeo, it was the PMM team that held significant sway. In other companies, it might be finance, engineering, or growth teams.
If I had to derive a single most important signal where the power center is, I’d say - check the background of the founders or the CEO. That’s the reason why Brian Chesky talks a lot about user experience, and why Airbnb looks 10x better than Booking (yup, that’s a subjective statement, sue me!). That’s pretty in line with what Jeffrey Pfeffer talks about in his book on Power mentioned above, while also suggesting more tools to identify those power centers within an organization.
Since one usually gets hired because of a very specific skill, I’d straightaway ask my manager during the first 1-on-1, why they hired me among other candidates. That can also be a good indicator of what a company values in you. More on that is in the next articles.
Imagine the next scenario: After finishing a meeting with you, the person you had it with goes to grab some coffee and meets a colleague in the kitchen. That colleague asks what they are up to, and they said they just had a meeting with you.
- Oh, and how did it go?
The precise answer to this question is what composes your personal brand. Now, I’d share two cases, as I’m yet to come up with a ready-to-go framework, but hopefully teaching by example will do it.
- Damn, he was so freaking good with data! I can’t!
As you might have guessed, personal brand in this case is around being data-driven. That’s my case. What can I do to make people say that? Essentially, I create a list of all the exposure points for my work and make sure that I present relevant data there. This is either real-time communication or artifacts - think PRDs, Briefs, etc - that get created in the process.
In small meetings, 1-on-1s, standups, and working sessions - I can make sure I have all the numbers and related stats ready. But how exactly?
I need to get the agenda beforehand, so I can figure out the questions we aim to answer. Then, I need to think about what kind of data would help us to get there, and after all open Amplitude and pull everything up, make sure that whenever there’s a question, and it starts with: “Do we know…” - we, in fact, do know.
Then I work on the documents. No matter if it’s a PRD or a market research document, I’d follow the “Write like Amazonian” style. All adjectives and weasel words get replaced with numbers.
From the strategic side - we demonstrate a very specific starting point for whatever decision we’re making. We root our thinking in data and it’s the main argument we use to prioritize one thing over the other, which in turn helps people associate us with all-things-data.
From the tactical side, we must go into details whenever data is involved. Experiment bucketing, adjusting p-value for A/B/n tests, and having dashboards for our team. I’d go as far as challenging the BI team’s work on some occasions, but surely it requires a certain degree of knowledge.
The best part? You don’t need to know Pandas to follow the strategic adjustments mentioned above, but that’s exactly how you follow the 80/20 rule.
What do all of those things have in common?
Say, you want to go after the user-centric brand. Take the examples mentioned above, and swap them with customer quotes, user interviews, or meta-analysis for some of the research that has been done in the past. You can recreate the same thing for any other brand anchors you came up with.
To be able to maintain the brand, I’d need to change my routine and, in the example of PRD, create my own template with that data section in it, so I don’t forget to add qualitative evidence.
I block off 1.5 hours at the beginning of the day. The first 30 minutes go to review all the upcoming meetings and agendas. I then pull up data for those meetings into a separate doc. On occasions, I’d block 10 minutes before the meeting, to review all I have and see if something is missing.
I then have an end-of-day review, which is another 30 minutes to check my calendar for tomorrow and see what I’ll need to do. The trick here is to have that EOD review somewhere around 3:30-4:00 PM, so there’s still time left to follow up with other folks and request details or an agenda for tomorrow’s call, for instance.
Yes, sometimes it happens that I don’t have the data, or the data I have is irrelevant to how the conversion is turning out. That’s fine. It’s not necessary to kill it every single meeting. So don’t stress too much.
I also use EODs to sort all the other tasks out and create the execution plan. And off we go to…
- He’s reliable as hell! We even talked about that small thing from about two months ago.
Now, this is clearly about reliability. I’d send you back to check the How to be reliable guide from Leah if you haven't yet.
It boils down to a system for capturing work, prioritizing it, and meeting deadlines. Let's break it down.
How to capture all the work? We need to effectively manage our day, week, and month. For half-years and years - there are usually some processes introduced by a company with check-ins and status updates, offsites, etc.
Callout: what works for me, or Leah, or anyone else won’t necessarily work for you. Treat it as a playground and experiment with what fits you.
From Leah's article, she uses a book for daily planning and post-its for larger projects. I, on the other hand, swear by the cheapest FedEx notebooks. Give me a stack of those, and a year later, you'll find all projects completed flawlessly. For those who have worked with me, if something wasn't perfect, blame the lack of those notebooks!
To capture work, you need two subsystems: one for jotting things down quickly, and another for organizing tasks over time. For this, don’t rely solely on tools like Trello – I've yet to meet someone who can use it so effectively that they never forget anything. Use end-of-day reviews to sort your notes and compile a backlog, and this time something like Trello will do it just fine.
After capturing them, we need to prioritize them. We can’t do it all, right? Prioritizing is about doing what matters most. Eliminate as much as possible, park non-urgent tasks for later, and focus on the essentials. To cross out things, it can be a bit of a back-and-forth process, where I’d usually follow up with a stakeholder to check if something really needs to get into the work. Then I discuss it with my manager on our 1-on-1 and then let that stakeholder know the priority (if it all) and a deadline. Hopefully, that would allow me to remove some of the items, and then work with the manager to set the priorities for those remaining.
I admit that sometimes I don’t write it down unless I get asked about it twice. I don’t do it in a W2 setting, obviously, but use it often for other things - side projects or personal life. Sorry!
Now, about meeting the deadlines. That’s about planning a week. This is exactly where something like Trello can help a lot. Essentially, we need to see what’s due this week or today and plan accordingly. Honestly, I haven't come up yet with anything better than just calendar reminders. For something really important, I’d duplicate the reminders every 15 minutes (lol, I know), but that works for me.
I also have internal and external deadlines. I try to set the external deadlines at least 25% longer than internal. I usually would try to double the time first and then cut it back to 25% once I face a pushback.
I don’t plan my day hour by hour, as it never worked for me in the past, and I can’t force myself to do a thing if I don’t feel like it (unless there’s a deadline). I usually just block off the time for deep work, and then refer to my list of projects to pick whatever I want to do first.
It’s good while it works, but then inevitably, the deadline might slip. It’s hard! It’s hard, especially if you're an overoptimistic person like I am, and you showed that it’s all good multiple times in the past, and now - boom! There are two things I do in this case:
First, I let stakeholders know there’s potentially a change in the deadline. I do it on a regular check-in, and usually frame it as: “There’s a possibility we won’t be able to deliver X on time because of Y. We do Z to mitigate it now. Once confirmed, I’d communicate it explicitly”.
Second, if it is confirmed, I’d send a Slack message or an email. Again, it’s extremely hard for me, I take it personally, and yada yada. So I usually phrase it as the MOST transactional technical message possible, removing all the emotions, and whatnot. For some reason, pretending it’s just a message similar to one of your boring “To reset a password, click this button” emails, it gets easier to communicate the slippage and adjust the plans. That’s what I have been failing to do for such a long time, that I’m even a bit ashamed to admit it, but it’s the single most crucial thing to build trust. More on that in the next note on this topic!
I can’t state how much regret I hold for not doing it earlier, so don’t make this lame mistake. Let people know the plan needs to be changed ASAP!
As for the action items:
Define your brand around the values of the company or your direct manager.
Adjust the verbal communication and tweak the artifacts accordingly.
Change the daily routine so that it supports you.
And remember - one step at a time!