The product leader's public voice became a hiring signal, not just personal branding

Hiring managers google you before they read your resume. This is not a trend. It is a fact, and it has been one for long enough that pretending otherwise is a career risk. What they find when they search your name, or more precisely what they do not find, shapes the decision before the first interview. The question is whether you had any say in what they saw.

The private excellence trap

For most of my career, I believed the work would speak for itself. I built products at Adobe, shipped features at scale, made decisions that drove measurable commercial outcomes. I had the resume, the references, the stories. But none of that was visible to anyone who had not already worked with me.

This is the private excellence trap: the belief that doing good work quietly is sufficient proof of your capability. It worked for a long time. In a world where hiring committees relied on referrals and structured interviews, internal excellence was enough. You could build a career entirely behind closed doors and trust that the people who mattered would find you.

But that world is shrinking. The talent market for senior product roles has changed. Everyone who reaches the VP or CPO level has strong credentials. Everyone has shipped products, managed teams, and can tell a compelling story about a pivot they led. When the baseline is uniformly high, credentials stop being a differentiator. They become a minimum requirement.

So hiring managers look for something else. They look for the public signal.

What the public signal actually is

The public signal is not about follower counts or viral posts. It is about evidence of thinking. When a hiring committee reads your Substack, they are not checking whether you are a good writer. They are checking whether you think clearly, whether you can structure an argument, whether you have genuine conviction about how products should be built. Writing is just the medium. Clarity is the message.

I know a senior PM who learned this the hard way. He had spent twelve years building a strong track record at two well-known enterprise companies. His resume was impeccable. He made it to the final round for a VP of Product role at a Series C company.

He did not get the job.

The candidate who did had a weaker resume by conventional measures: fewer years, smaller teams, less revenue responsibility. But she had a well-read Substack where she wrote about product strategy with precision and conviction. She had given talks at three conferences in the previous year. The hiring committee told him, through a mutual contact, that her public writing demonstrated "clarity of thinking" that interviews alone could not establish.

But here is the part that stings. They were not wrong.

Interviews are a narrow window. You get sixty minutes to demonstrate how you think. The candidate who has published fifty essays on product strategy walks in with fifty additional data points already on the table. The candidate who has published nothing walks in with a resume and a handshake. But one has evidence, and the other has only claims.

The Wayanad experiment

When I left my corporate role and moved to Wayanad, I started writing publicly. Not because I had a content strategy or a personal branding plan. I wrote because I had opinions about product work that I had been sharing in meeting rooms for years, and I wanted to see if they held up before a wider audience. It felt like opening a shop window after years of working in a locked back room.

The shift was immediate and startling.

Within months, the quality and quantity of inbound opportunities changed in ways that fifteen years of corporate career building never achieved. People reached out who had read something I wrote and wanted to talk about a role, a consulting engagement, a speaking invitation. My writing was doing work that my resume could not, because it showed how I thought in real time, not just what I had accomplished in the past.

But I want to be honest about something. The writing itself was not magic. It was not particularly polished in the early days. What mattered was that it existed. A resume says "I did these things." A body of public writing says "this is how I see the world."

The second one is harder to fake.

Why most product leaders still resist

There are reasonable objections to writing publicly. Time is the obvious one. Senior product leaders are busy people, and carving out hours to write feels like a luxury when you are managing a team, shipping a product, and putting out fires simultaneously.

But the time objection is often a cover for the real resistance: fear of being wrong publicly.

Internal work is safe. You share an opinion in a meeting, and it lives and dies in that room. But put your thinking on the internet and suddenly anyone can disagree with you. Publicly. With their own audience watching.

This fear is understandable. It is also exactly the thing that makes public writing valuable as a hiring signal. The willingness to stake a position where others can challenge it is, itself, evidence of confidence in your thinking. Hiring committees are not just reading what you wrote. They are reading the fact that you wrote it at all.

Private excellence is no longer sufficient evidence of leadership capability.

I have mentored product leaders who spent weeks perfecting a single essay, paralysed by the possibility that someone might poke a hole in their argument. But the ones who have built the strongest public signals publish regularly, accept that not everything will land, and treat disagreement as a feature rather than a threat. The mess is part of the proof.

The resume runs out of space

Your public voice is not personal branding. It is the only portfolio that matters when the resume runs out of space. And the resume always runs out of space, because a resume is a list of what you did, not a window into how you think.

But I am not arguing that everyone needs to become a content creator. The product leader who writes one thoughtful essay a month carries more signal than the one who posts three times a day with nothing to say. Volume without substance is noise. Substance without volume is still substance.

The distinction matters. What I am arguing is that the era of purely private careers at the senior level is closing. Not because the world has become shallow or attention-driven. But because when you are hiring for judgment, you want to see judgment exercised. A resume tells you someone was in the room. Public writing tells you what they did once they got there.

I still talk to product leaders who believe that building great products is enough. That their track record will carry them. That the work speaks for itself.

But the work does not speak. It sits in a locked filing cabinet, visible only to the people who were already in the room. The public signal is the shop window. And increasingly, the people doing the hiring are walking past the shops with nothing in the window, no matter how good the inventory inside.

The best time to start building a public voice was five years ago. But the second best time is not today, exactly. It is the next time you have an opinion you would normally share only in a meeting room and you choose instead to write it down where anyone can find it.

That single choice, repeated enough times, changes a career.