Growing your personal brand can improve your credibility, give you greater impact, and lead to better opportunities, Pablo Fredrikson said at QCon San Francisco. As a staff plus engineer, helping others solve problems creates value for the company. His advice is to find out what you are passionate about, learn more about it, get better at it, and share it, to build your personal brand over time.
A personal brand is the impression or perception of an individual, as Fredrikson explained:
Your personal brand is a culmination of the experiences, skills, and values that differentiate you.
Whether you like it or not, you already have a personal brand, even if you try not to, Fredrikson mentioned.
Software developers should care about their personal brand because it is part of “selling” themselves to peers and superiors, Fredrikson said. It can be a way to get access to better projects, a promotion, or even a career change, he added.
By improving your personal brand, you’ll also improve your credibility. With that influence, you can inspire others and add significant value to the company, Fredrikson mentioned. For principal engineers, this impact extends far beyond their immediate team, as Fredrikson explained:
A strong personal brand enables you to shape decisions and strategies at the organizational level, driving company-wide improvements, and fostering a culture of excellence.
As IT professionals, we’re constantly learning as part of our job, Fredrikson said. It’s an incredible advantage—we’re paid to grow our skills and knowledge, he added. If we take full advantage of this, we can not only elevate our careers but also inspire and help others along the way, he explained:
In order to build my brand I needed to be better at my job, so I learned a lot of new technologies and techniques that I needed to expose my knowledge.
To improve your brand, Fredrikson suggested finding what you are passionate about. Keep talking about it, get better at it, and share it, he advised:
Maybe it’s dinosaurs, maybe it’s clean code or maybe it is leading productive teams. There is something you can’t shut up about, so don’t!
Fredrikson mentioned that at the end of the day, you just need to become a better person. Customers don’t care if you use X or Y technology, they just want to use your software, he said. So if you care about them, and you build a good team, you’ll make a good product and your customers will be happy, he concluded.
InfoQ interviewed Pablo Fredrikson about building his personal brand.
InfoQ: What benefits did you get from building your brand?
Pablo Fredrikson: Let me give an example. During a project about cutting down costs in our infrastructure, I learned about Karpenter, an open source tool that automatically selects the best machines for your Kubernetes cluster. The tool helped us to save money and also I made a video about it on my YouTube channel.
Once I got that, I was able to get exposure and that definitely helped me to get more interviews and opportunities. I was also able to give this talk at Qcon because of my brand!
InfoQ: What worked and what didn’t work in elevating your brand?
Fredrikson: You definitely need to be open to pivoting. At first, I started creating more “vloggy” videos, like recording an adventure of going to get ice cream—things like that. It didn’t work at all. I didn’t have an audience, and no one cared about my personal stories.
So, I pivoted. I realized I was already learning and growing every day through my work, and the roles I aspired to required teaching and sharing experiences. I decided to align my content with that goal. I faked it until I made it—I learned, helped people at my job, and then used that knowledge to help others outside of it. In essence, I got paid to learn, and I turned that into an opportunity to grow my brand.
