Comment by 0xB31B1B
1 year ago
this mirrors my experience, but it doesn't give much actionable advice and probably only rings true to those who have experienced the same motions. "You only know your project shipped if your leadership acknowledges it". Yes ok great, how do you get their attention. I think this piece could be more easy to understand and influential if the author included a specific IRL project as a case study instead of having a bit of memoir about the vibes of their experience.
Internal Marketing is the primary role of the Product Manager at a lot of big companies.
And this is why it sucks so much to work as an engineer on big companies.
You're not even able to do your politics effectively without a middleman that can easily undermine you.
The only path to career advancement to this is to job hop as much as possible.
The author just shipped the post
We can't be sure of that -- what did their boss say? That's all that matters.
If they aren't paying attention then move to a project they /do/ signal interest in with their attention, and ship that.
> Yes ok great, how do you get their attention
I'll tell you my own personal experience here: Go talk about it!
Depending on the culture and rituals at your company:
- Ask for a spot at an all-hands meeting so your team can showcase what you shipped
- Record a demo video of the team's work and share it in Slack/Teams/Yammer
- Write a post-mortem or internal blog post about the impact that your "ship" had on the business.
- Etc...
I'm a firm believer in the concept of "internal marketing" in big companies. I've had leaders and mentors repeatedly tell me "no one will recognize you in a big company if you just sit around waiting for the recognition"...
You have to put it out there and talk about it and show it off...
And yeah, I know a lot of tech folks hate doing this.. But in my experience that's how you play the game in an honest way... Find the right time and place to be proud of your work and show it off.
Yeah, I agree this post would have been better with a concrete example. It's hard to talk about a specific project though, since it comes down to describing in detail facts about a company's internal workings (often embarrassing facts). I couldn't figure out how to anonymize it sufficiently.