Standing out through writing
Writing is thinking; writing in public is networking.
I don’t have to tell you that the tech job market is in chaos. But ask anyone on LinkedIn, and they’ll give you the same foolproof solution: simply establish a personal brand, and you’ll be beating off recruiters with a stick.
Obviously, it’s easier said than done. But unlike most advice from LinkedIn, this one actually worked for me.
If you’ve heard of me at all, it’s probably because of my writing. Some of it is even good: one of Medium’s most highlighted sentences of 2024 came from my pen. I’ve been accused of being a thought leader, and since I’ve written for NN/g I can’t claim to be beating those allegations.
Maybe this approach will work for you too.
Writing for the right reasons
Even during the boom years of tech, people often asked me for tips on how to write.
One of the earliest issues of my weekly newsletter explored the overlaps between writing and the design process; and the critical distinction between writing (noun) and writing (verb).
But that’s not what people usually asked about. Usually they asked “how can I get as many followers as you?”
Followers vs Audiences
Among its other sins, social media is a highly quantified space. My modest success in that space, as represented by the number of followers I have, is public information, so it naturally draws other people with a smaller number who want their number to be big.
If all you want is a big number next to your name, writing is not the fastest way to get there. The fastest way to get there is follow-back spam: you follow as many people as the website will allow you to, in the hopes that a fraction of them will return the favor. Some of the most toxic commentators in the UX space built massive followings this way.
But if that’s what you want, go download Michael Sayman’s SocialAI and get guaranteed engagement with everything you post. Sure, they’re all bots, but why should that stop you? Half of everything on LinkedIn is written by bots. X has never been more lousy with bots. Meta desperately wants their bots to be your best friends.
All those gamed followers are not an audience. Whatever goal you want out of your writing, a juiced follower count won’t help you get any closer to it.
Your brand’s audience is people who can hire you
This is doubly true if you are trying to establish a personal brand. While revenue from one subscriber is indistinguishable from another, the usefulness of your brand is determined entirely by the quality of the audience members that it attracts.
It’s not enough to have people reading your stuff. It’s not even enough to have people think that your stuff is good. The people thinking your stuff is good need to be senior enough to be hiring managers, or at least high-level ICs influencing those managers.
I’ve had past colleagues tell me that they wanted to set up a personal brand, and the way they were going to accomplish this was to set up an LLM that would generate posts for them. If you do that, be prepared to accumulate the kind of audience that you’d expect: people who think LLM-generated content is insightful.
Feedback loops, and the role of social networks
Intuitively, one of the prerequisites of getting good writing in front of hiring managers is producing good writing in the first place. Which itself is a combination of writing craft and having good ideas. And no tool in the world is going to be able to do that second thing for you; LLMs by definition will produce commodity-grade thinking and your audience will be able to tell.
Fortunately, as designers we already know that good ideas don’t spring into the world fully-formed. They are created through iteration, with different tools existing to shepherd the idea through different stages of conceptual fidelity.
Stage 0: Riffing
Once upon a time, I was a new Twitter user with zero followers. More recently I’ve also been a new Medium user, Mastodon user, and Bluesky user with zero followers. A big reason behind starting Product Picnic was because audiences do not transfer across proprietary platforms, but emails do.
But in the meantime, I got pretty good at building up those audiences from scratch. And the best way to do that is by finding conversations other people are having, and contributing to them.
Your feed is not really your friend here, because you won’t see any interesting conversations until you’ve found the interesting people having them. Websites have different tools (hashtags, search, LinkedIn groups, Bluesky starter packs and custom feeds) that make this job easier.
Once you’ve found those conversations, join them! But — and this is critical — not before you’ve read the other replies. Being the nᵗʰ person to comment “this is just UX vs UI” is not adding value.
Stage 1: Complaining, and other ways to have a point of view
The world has enough “top 10 UX techniques” posts in it. They are low-effort engagement bait, and will be received as such by the people you most want to impress. Dunking on “bad” designs will get you an equally low-quality audience.
Rather than parade your superior taste, what you want to do is offer a compelling and unique point of view. One of the most common pieces of feedback I receive is that I put into words what others have been thinking; typically the topic at hand is some dysfunction of the modern software development lifecycle.
The SDLC has no shortage of dysfunction. Pick a pattern you’ve observed, or share a story.
The wonderful thing about social media is that individual posts don’t need to be earth-shattering insights. In fact, the less you think about them, the better. Type something and shoot it out into the world; if you have something to add later, that’s what threads were invented for. Since Bluesky has both strict character limits and threading, it’s what I use for this stage.
Analogous domains are another great source of inspiration. For UX, our sister fields of game design and content design have a wealth of scholarship with ready applications in our own space. Other fields that study systems or decision-making such as urban planning can provide unexpected insights.
Stage 2: Refining
Posting half-finished thoughts has two important functions. One, it gets you thinking about how to finish the thought fully. Two, it puts the thought under a stress test from drive-by commenters who don’t share your mental model and probably didn’t even read the whole thing. Like early-stage user testing, this is your opportunity to identify the most obvious gaps in the idea before iterating further.
Once the idea has percolated in my head & in public for long enough, I’ll typically make a post on LinkedIn next. The permissive character count makes it easier to go in-depth where necessary, and the higher conceptual fidelity of the idea at this stage is a better fit for the more professional audience there.
But just because it’s professional doesn’t mean it has to be milquetoast. While you shouldn’t troll solely for engagement, people are far more likely to engage with writing that’s passionate and has a human voice, compared to sanitized corporate speak (another compelling reason to leave LLMs out of this process).
LinkedIn does a better job of surfacing content that’s a bit older (posts hitting the 1 week mark frequently get boosted back into the feed, for no clear reason) so don’t be afraid to let ideas sit and come back to them later. You can keep track of posts by saving links to an external doc when you post them (in the manner of an annotated bibliography), or just use search to find them later.
Stage 3: Combining
This is the secret sauce, except it’s not secret anymore because I’m telling you about it right now for free. The most compelling writing creates connections across ideas; it bridges facts and then articulates an argument for how those facts are related.
You don’t need to overload on ideas. Two or three will do; anecdotally, my articles that are shorter than 7 minutes to read do far better than longer ones. And even if you want to go ham on the word count, don’t play all your cards at once — after all, you’re gonna want to write more later.
Give your reader a familiar staring point (some of my worst-performing articles were too esoteric, but then again, the quantity of eyeballs is not as important as their quality). Then introduce just enough additional concepts to pave the path towards a conclusion (a call to action, or a take-away). Those are what will get people sharing your post beyond your own network where more hiring managers will see it.
What that take-away will look like is obviously going to be field-specific. But giving an example of the right way to do something (from a single tip to a whole diagram or template) is much more likely to resonate than three thousand words about the wrong way.
Building a corpus
Obviously, the best long-term place to post the writing is on your own website. But it’s much easier to do it on Medium. I suppose there are other free platforms, but you really should not be using Substack, and posting on LinkedIn Pulse doesn’t get as many aggregate views as posting on here and then making a LinkedIn post about it.
If you write about evergreen topics rather than just trends, you can also refer back to older pieces. Either share out the same piece with a different summary, or link to an older article from a newer one. Over time it’ll help you form coherent relationships between your entire body of work, which will also make it much easier to move across these topics in an interview context.
And once you’re a bigshot and want to write a book, this corpus will make it much easier to do. Don’t forget to send me a copy.
