I’ve been thinking about categories lately. They make decision making easier, and helps customers situate you in their minds, so they can compare and choose.
This works for human resources as much as it does for products.
Early in careers, it pays off to be good at one thing, sticking yourself in a particular category, because it makes the decision easier for your prospective employer. Founders/recruiters can find you easy to hire if you say you are a content marketer vs, say, a SaaS marketer, when they will have to do a bit more work.
But as you grow in your career, that’s not enough. You might get pigeonholed into one particular skillset that may not pay very well and has no path to growth.
This is exactly why so many amazing content people I worked with moved away from the role as soon as they could. Because none of the companies they worked at wanted to pay them better, or give them a path to growth. This is also why you don’t see many senior content folks at Indian technology companies, especially now when our startups needs the talent.
How then should you think about growth when you are well into your career?
For the first few years, it’s enough for you to answer the question: "What am I very good at?"
But as you grow, however, you need to answer something completely different: "What is the thing only I am good at?"
I’ll give you an example.
There’s a friend of mine, Adithya Venkatesan. After doing some PR work, he stumbled on to a great role at GO-JEK, where he worked on the employer brand. And in the 4 years since, became especially skilled at building up a global talent brand. He has talked about in a couple of places, especially this podcast, which another superstar friend, Abhash Kumar, hosts.
This last month he joined Meesho, with a clear brief for its talent brand. And even when I congratulated him, I was struck by how well he had positioned himself.
He was not answering the question 'what am I good at', which would have meant taking on any other role that came to him; I’m sure there were many. He answered the question 'what is the thing only I am good at': He’s probably the only person who has done this for a global brand from India. This makes him valuable for a company like Meesho.
Adithya is not moving jobs, he is building a career.
And there’s a lot to learn from that.
In the early years of my career, Girish, on seeing me working on something else other than content, would tell me that that if I wasn’t writing something, I was wasting the company’s time. At that time in Freshworks, I was the only writer, and therefore my job was to create.
A lot of people could do other things, but I needed to do what only I could do.
This last year as I’ve worked at Accel, the link between venture capital and content has become hard to miss. I’ve written about this before from a different lens. But it has become clear that content is a key differentiator for VC firms. The First Round review, a16z’s Future, and so on are not accidents.
This is also why my role at Accel exists: We have a popular podcast hosted by Anand Daniel, we have blogs on the way the firm thinks, and the sectors our startups operate in. There is an entire website dedicated to helping young startups. We have launched a new program for very early stage startups, which has a blog of its own. There’s social media to run.
All of this comes under the large umbrella of brand, and the central piece, around which all of this is built, is content.
I know that this is what I’m good at, so I will stay there. But within content there are a couple of things only I am good at. That’s what I will go towards.
This is what you have to figure out for yourself. Do it.