Building in public as a career infrastructure strategy, not just content marketing

The best product people I have met over twenty years have something in common, and it is not a prestigious company on their resume. It is that almost nobody outside their company has any idea how good they are. They spent two decades shipping products, leading teams, making the kinds of decisions that kept businesses alive, and they did it all inside buildings where the walls absorbed every ounce of that reputation. The work was real. The visibility was not.

I know this because I was one of them.

The visibility deficit

I spent years building products at Boeing, Adobe, Nike, and Freshworks. At Boeing, I redesigned interfaces for aviation crews who wore gloves in cockpits. At Adobe, I worked on enterprise design problems that touched millions of users. At Nike, I was close to how consumer retail products were built at scale. At Freshworks, I watched a SaaS company grow from startup energy into enterprise ambition. All of it was meaningful work. All of it lived behind corporate walls.

When I left that world and moved to Wayanad to work independently, I discovered something uncomfortable. Almost nobody outside those companies knew my name. I had two decades of credentials and zero public signal. My resume listed the logos, sure. But the market does not hire logos. It hires people it already trusts, people whose thinking it has encountered before, people whose perspective it has tested against its own judgment before the first conversation even happens.

That gap between what you have done and what the market knows you have done is what I call the visibility deficit. It is the most expensive career problem that nobody talks about, because it only reveals itself at the worst possible moment: when you need the market to know you, and it does not.

Your best work is invisible to the market unless you make it visible yourself.

When the deficit comes due

A senior PM I know, someone with fifteen years of exceptional work at well-known companies, was laid off last year. She had led product strategy for teams of forty. She had shipped features used by millions. Her internal performance reviews were outstanding every single cycle. None of that mattered the day her access badge stopped working.

She spent three months applying for roles through the usual channels. Tailored resumes. Cover letters. Recruiter calls. The conversion rate was brutal. Not because she lacked the skills. Because the market had no independent evidence she possessed them. Her track record was locked inside companies that had already moved on.

But then she tried something different. She started writing on LinkedIn. Not performative thought leadership with stock photos. Just clear, specific observations from her fifteen years of product work. How she had handled a pricing decision that went wrong. What she learned about stakeholder management when three VPs disagreed on a roadmap. The framework she used to prioritise when everything felt urgent.

Within six months, she had more inbound opportunities than three months of applications had produced. People she had never met were reaching out with specific questions about her thinking. Hiring managers were citing her posts in initial conversations. She told me she felt like she had been professionally invisible for fifteen years and then suddenly became visible in six months. The visibility deficit had accumulated silently for her entire career. But writing in public paid it down faster than she had thought possible.

A public body of work compounds in ways that a private track record cannot.

Career infrastructure, not content

There is a distinction I want to draw carefully here. Building in public is not content marketing. Content marketing serves a product or a business. Career infrastructure serves you. It is the accumulated body of evidence that tells the market who you are, how you think, and why your perspective is worth paying attention to, all before anyone opens your resume.

I did not understand this when I started writing from Wayanad. I thought I was sharing ideas because I found the act of writing clarifying, which it was. But what I did not realise was that every article, every observation, every honest account of something I had got wrong was building a structure that would outlast any individual role or project. People I had never met started referencing my thinking in their own conversations. Consulting requests arrived from strangers who had read three or four pieces and decided they trusted my judgment. The career infrastructure was being assembled in public, one post at a time, without me having a strategy for it.

But here is the part that surprises people: the writing itself made me better at the work. Explaining your product thinking to a public audience forces a precision that internal documents do not require. When you write for colleagues, you can rely on shared context. When you write for strangers, every assumption needs to earn its place. The act of building in public is not separate from the act of building your craft. They are the same activity viewed from different angles.

Why product people resist it

Most product professionals I talk to understand this argument intellectually. But they do not act on it. The reasons are predictable.

Some believe the work should speak for itself. It should. But it cannot speak if nobody can hear it.

Some worry about sharing ideas that their employer might consider proprietary. This is a legitimate concern, and the answer is simple. Do not write about your company's strategy. Write about your own thinking. There is a difference between revealing a roadmap and sharing a framework for how you prioritise.

Some feel the whole exercise is narcissistic. I understand that instinct. But there is nothing narcissistic about making your professional thinking accessible to people who might benefit from it. The discomfort is a leftover from corporate cultures that treated visibility as vanity and silence as professionalism.

But the most common reason is simpler than any of those. They are too busy doing the work to talk about the work. I was that person for twenty years. It cost me a decade of career infrastructure I can never get back.

The compound curve

Career infrastructure compounds. It does not grow linearly. The first ten posts feel like shouting into a void. The thirtieth post reaches someone who shares it with someone who hires you for a project you would never have found through applications. The fiftieth post becomes a reference point in a conversation at a company you have never heard of. The visibility deficit shrinks, and then it reverses. You stop searching for opportunities. Opportunities start searching for you.

But the compound curve only works if you start. And starting feels pointless, because the early returns are almost invisible. This is exactly why so few product people do it. The payoff is delayed, and the discomfort is immediate. Writing a post about your thinking and watching it get twelve views feels like a waste of time. It is not. It is the first deposit into an account that will pay interest for the rest of your career.

I spent twenty years building products inside companies where the work was real and the reputation was trapped. Starting to write publicly from a small town in Kerala changed the trajectory of my career more than any single role, promotion, or credential ever did. Not because the writing was brilliant. Because it was visible.

The things you build inside a company belong to the company. The thinking you share in public belongs to you. That difference matters more the longer your career runs.