How to Build Your Reputation

What will people think when they see your name?

You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.

- Brian P. Morgan

A common theme I’ve noticed in my 1:1s is frustration.

• “Why don’t people trust my plan, I know what I’m talking about!”

• “Why won’t my manager let me lead this project, I know I can do it”

I’ve been there too, you know yourself better than anyone else so it’s easy for you to see why you’re able to do something. But the fact of the matter is, there’s no reason anyone should trust you by default.

I’ll give you 3 simple ways to gain that reputation:

• Execute

• Execute

• Execute some more

There’s no amount of product designs, proposals, or talk that will get you the respect you desire at your company.

Think of who you look up to the most on your team. Why do you look up to them? I’m going to guess it’s not about what they’ve said in your meetings but what they’ve done at the company.

Now, what does execution look like? Let’s talk about a few of my favorite strategies:

1. Fixing the annoying problem everyone ignores

2. Asking the hard questions

3. Consistently doing what you say you will do

1. Fixing the annoying problem everyone ignores

What is starting to sound like a broken record in your stand ups?

I’ll give some examples of my past teams and potential solutions:

• I was paged last night but it was a no-op, the API is probably more sensitive than it should be

  • Figure out how to update thresholds for your team and do it

• I wasn’t able to get my task done, the customer experience team needed my help updating some configs that only can be updated by scripts right now

  • Create a UI that allows customer experience to do this directly

• I’m not sure what to pick up next so I just did some random things in the backlog

  • Create a process that makes it easy for any engineer to know what the next top priority there is to be done

Taking just a few hours a week to solve these problems is probably the easiest way to gain respect. Engineers love someone who just fixes things instead of talking about how we should fix them.

2. Asking the hard questions

Have you ever noticed a project going downhill but didn’t say anything? Maybe during lunch you complained with your friend about how incompetent a leader was, how bad a design was or even how the project was a waste of time all together.

Once the project fails, you find yourself telling your friend “I told you so, I knew the project was a hot mess!”

Well… why didn’t you say anything 😂

Ok, you might be thinking, “that’s above my pay grade, not my job to fix this disaster.” That may very well be true, and you could leave at that! But why not use it to your advantage?

Instead, when these meetings are happening ask the hard questions.

As usual, here are some examples of situations and hard questions you could ask:

• You notice the lead of the project says that it’ll take 2 weeks to do something that you know will take at least 3 months

  • “I noticed you said adding the CRUD APIs for the dashboard will take 2 weeks but last time we did something similar it took 2 months due to how long it took to get feedback from DevRel on a public API — how are we able to cut that down for this project?”

• During a planning meeting you notice the team going down a rabbit hole about adding a features not on the original product spec

  • “While I think adding feature X would be awesome, wouldn’t that push back our timeline? It wasn’t on the original product spec so just wanted to make sure that it’s worth potentially modifying our timeline”

It might be difficult to speak up at first, but these comments can save you and the team months of wasted efforts.

3. Consistently doing what you say you will do

One of my favorite quotes from Michael Seibel comes from What Makes The Top 10% of Founders Different:

It’s pretty intimidating to work with someone who is constantly getting things done … intimidating in a way where they demand respect because they get shit done.

Notice this doesn’t have anything to do with what you’re getting done or how you get it done — but more about just doing the damn thing. Here’s examples of anti-patterns.

• Saying in planning that you’ll be able to get something done but end up coming back 2 weeks later saying things came up and you weren’t able to finish

• Offering to set up a brown bag or code review club but never committing to making it consistent

• Promising to create an onboarding document for future new hires but not having anything ready by the time the new engineer starts.

Start to take your word seriously. Before saying yes to something ask yourself if it’s something you should be doing. If not, say no! If yes, get the damn thing done no matter what.

Thanks for reading ❤️‍🔥

Eden