(2020-10-12) Torenberg See Your Career As A Product

Erik Torenberg: See your Career as a Product. Every great product should have a moat, and careers are no different. I previously wrote about personal moats (2020-09-25-TorenbergBuildPersonalMoats), today I want to further flesh out the “Career as a Product” metaphor.

You want to Get So Good They Can’t Ignore You (10x better product) before doubling down on networking (marketing & PR).

legibility and durability — as time goes on, does your work look more impressive or less?

certain mistakes product builders make also carry over to careers

Every great product should have “loops” built in, and careers are no different. (Positive Feedback)

the process by which one cohort of users not only retains but leads to an additional cohort of users

Building a funnel without a loop means you have to keep pushing to get output

“What are the things you can do today which make it easier to obtain your desired resources and career opportunities tomorrow, in a way that’s defensible and compounds overtime?”

As I mentioned in my piece on taking asymmetric risks, IMO the biggest career mistake young people make is that they’re afraid to look dumb, so they follow safe paths

As information symmetry increases, however, the value of a brand decreases. In a world with perfect information symmetry, your Harvard degree is only worth the intrinsic value of the skills/networks/etc you developed there.

I posit there are four different types of career loops, or assets:
Specialized Knowledge / Skills (“Get So Good They Can’t Ignore You”)
Financial Capital ($)
Brand / Legibility (ability for your skills/assets to be widely recognizable)
Unique Network Access/Strength

Respect — this is a loop that most enables other loops. I didn’t put it as one of the four because you can’t go after it directly — it’s a byproduct of something else. Indeed, I’d posit that respect is best earned from gaining (and deploying) specialized knowledge & skills.

Knowledge and skills is another great loop to attract the other loops.

• in separate place he noted the strength of combining a skill with a warm niche.

you don’t want a lack of these other career assets to be constraints: You’ll need the “minimum viable money” to keep going and not have to take a job that doesn’t increase your specialized knowledge & skills. You’ll want the “minimum viable network”, to know the right people to help, and the “minimum viable legibility (reputation)” to get them to care.

Do find your tribe of collaborators and go deep with a handful, involving them in the value building process — developing skills, building something together, etc.