5 ways to increase your visibility in the workplace

Have you ever noticed how some people seem to always get the resources and budget they need for their projects, no matter what the priority is? Or how some people seem to regularly get promoted or assigned to high impact projects? It’s probably because they are the most visible employees in your organization. You might think that doing great work and getting great results is enough to advance your career, but it’s not. It’s only part of the equation when it comes to career growth. Whether you want to move up the corporate ladder, grow your influence, or simply get funding for your projects, if the people that can help you achieve these goals don’t know your credibility, your work doesn’t matter how much you’ve done.

Many times, people confuse visibility with showboating or unnecessary boasting. It’s not. Being visible is way more than just making yourself known. It’s making sure that your good work is seen! In the context of corporate life, visibility is a term used to define the extent to which an individual or a team’s work, contributions, and accomplishments are recognized, known, and appreciated by their organization. The worst thing you can do is try to create visibility without having amazing work to back it up. It is necessary to show the hard work, results, and the impact of your team. This is how you will get funded to do more great work, how you get through political decisions, and how you’ll get people to trust you. Some employees feel that remote employees are less visible. While it’s true that you may need to battle proximity bias, remote employees can still raise their visibility with the right steps. So how can you increase your visibility?

1. Deliver amazing results
2. Volunteer for opportunities
3. Mentorship
4. Continuous learning
5. Public platforms

Deliver amazing results

Deliver amazing results The bottom line is, you cannot highlight your work if you are not delivering exceptional results and doing it well. How can you deliver amazing results? Work on features that would have the highest impact on your customers and the team. Finding paths to reduce customer challenges, creating more efficiencies that reduce technical debt and overhead, and adding features that increase customer loyalty to your product are all ways that you can drive amazing results for your product. Ways that you can show your team is delivering:

• Deliver products and features faster than before with increased efficiency
• Deliver products and features that are better for your customers
• Deliver products and features that exceed product growth goals

Does great work matter if no one knows what you did? Once you have delivered amazing results, show your management! After you have delivered amazing results, you need to show the impact. How does it connect to business goals and overall growth? Let them see the impact of the work you have done. How have customers received it? How has it helped increase usage? Product management is a team effort. You are working with different groups across your organization.

Visibility should never exclusively be just about you. Giving your team kudos broadly for hitting hard milestones and delivering great success boosts your team’s profile too and reaffirms their team’s trust in you as their product leader to do the work and highlight the team’s successes. As a product manager, you’re typically drowning in feedback; solicited and unsolicited, from customers and other stakeholders. Buried in all those design changes, new features, and bug fixes, are positive stories. Find them and share them. Customer feedback goes a long way in telling the story of your product’s success. If you don’t have feedback rolling in from customers, seek it out. Use this guide highlighting different ways you can measure how your customers feel about and use your product. Some products and features are a massive effort.

Volunteer for opportunities

There are going to be assignments, projects, and opportunities that fall outside of your job role where your organization may ask for support. This could be something along the lines of being part of a committee, exploring a new concept, or managing an administrative goal. Whatever the task, it’s usually unrelated or can be considered a “stretch assignment.” A stretch assignment is the term used to describe a task or project that is beyond your scope and sometimes your skill set. These are tasks that need to be completed outside of your role and can often require significant additional time. The end goal of these assignments is typically to challenge you and provide learning opportunities that you may not get from your current day-to-day tasks. The benefit of volunteer assignments is that you usually get to meet colleagues who have volunteered as well. These colleagues may be outside of your team, outside of your role, and even outside of your organization.

When it comes to promotions, product priorities, or budget allocations, those decisions are made by leaders in and outside your team. A part of increasing your visibility is to make sure all decision-makers are aware of who you are and what you do. You may not have direct contact with those outside your team, but are there other forums you can use to showcase your work? Are there parts of your product that can be mutually beneficial to other teams? It can be hard to learn that information without having connections to other teams. Volunteering with a cross-functional team allows you to expand your network and gives you a broader view of who does what in other places of your company.

Mentorship

Seeking a mentor (or becoming one) is an important relationship, not just for your visibility but for your overall career growth. A great mentor-mentee relationship is usually beneficial to both participants. It provides a way for less experienced individuals to learn from those with more. It can also help more experienced individuals learn new methods and learnings from those with less experience. Good mentors can provide guidance, support, and help you navigate through ambiguity or complex scenarios. If they are in the same field as you, they can help you develop new skills and gain more in-depth knowledge of your discipline and industry.

The benefits of a good mentor can be positively impactful. It can help build your confidence, expand your skills and network, improve job performance, which ultimately leads to your career growth. How do you find a mentor though? If your workplace does not have a formal mentorship program, you can seek out individuals that have a skill you’d like to improve on or simply someone you’d want to model your career after. Reach out to those colleagues and ask them if they would like to be a mentor to you.

Continuous learning

As a product manager, it can be a challenge to get extra time to learn new things. Continuous learning is something that you should do at every level in every role, but if you are looking to increase visibility, this is a great start. Learning about new concepts or new methods of doing things should be something that we all prioritize but the reality is most people do not. By taking this on, you are already going to be ahead of most in your organization by carving out the time to learn new things. There is no one way to be a product manager. We all do things a bit differently, and no two products you work on are the same; they may require different skills and different approaches. While this ambiguity can make it hard to be a product manager, it can also be used to your advantage. By having the freedom and flexibility to expand your skills and apply new concepts or methods from what you have learned. When you seek out new information, you allow yourself to be more open to new ideas, concepts, and can overall become more innovative in your approach to product management.

Here’s an example of how you can use continuous learning to increase your visibility. We are set in the age of AI, and the amount of information and possibilities on its usage are endless. By skilling up in this area, you can become your organization’s subject matter expert and be able to educate others on it. Learn how it can be applied to your daily tasks, how to improve processes, or even how to create content. Learn about the age of AI, how it can help, how it can be applied. Bonus, you can share this information with your fellow product managers. Summarizing what you’ve learned, demonstrating how it can be used, helps others in your organization see you as someone who is forward-thinking and an expert. Guess who’ll be at the top of the list when an AI project comes around.

Public platforms

This goes back to our previous post on whether social media or any external platforms are necessary for product managers. Showing your expertise in your product space or even the management space publicly is a great way to boost your profile. Your management chain is likely on those same platforms and monitors them as well. This public branding allows you to solidify yourself as a subject matter expert in your industry. If you can show that you are engaging with customers on external platforms, it also shows your organization that you are able to engage on bigger platforms, such as conferences. When you are engaging externally, make sure you understand your company’s rules of engagement. This means understanding what you can and can’t share publicly, how you answer customer questions, and making any sort of commitment to new features or improvements. This step is optional and may not be required for all product managers, but it can help improve your visibility, both externally and internally.

Building credibility requires building visibility and making great work visible. This will require lots of work upfront on your part if this is something you have not been actively engaged in and may be a little more difficult to manage if you’re a remote employee. Your manager can help you gain visibility, do not rely on them being your only means of visibility, but never rely on them as the sole means for such a critical task. You must create your own path to increase your visibility on your own. As a product manager, we spend lots of time making sure that our products are visible and known to our customers. We should be putting in the same effort of promotion for ourselves and our teams. Visibility matters because there will be rooms and decisions where you are not present, and sometimes, your manager may not be either. In those instances, you need to make sure that people know who you are, what you do, and why you are essential to the growth of the business. With that in mind, when new opportunities come up, this keeps you at the top of the list.

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