Productize Yourself

Productize Yourself

To succeed in today’s competitive job market, saturated with tech talent due to the downturn in the tech industry, it’s not enough to simply have skills and expertise.

If you are applying to jobs or trying to succeed as an entrepreneur simply on the amount of raw knowledge you have, you will struggle to stand out amongst the competition. To succeed and attract attention as a freelancer, entrepreneur, or other professional, you need to be able to differentiate yourself and communicate your unique value proposition to potential clients, customers, and employers.

A useful phrase on how to market your unique skill set for any future opportunity is: “productize yourself”. It is this phrase, “productize yourself”, that I’d like to spend the next few minutes exploring.

I first heard the idea of “productize yourself” from Naval Ravikant, an angel investor, podcaster, and entrepreneur, best known for being the founder of AngelList. In one of his podcasts, Naval hammers home the idea of how productizing yourself, your talents, and your skills, makes you rich.

So what does it mean to productize yourself? Well, in the simplest terms I can muster; productizing yourself means packaging your skills and interest into a product that you can sell to society.

Said a little more verbosely:

• Productize/Productization: you are going to create a product out of whatever you naturally and uniquely do really, really well. The product you are building is the set of things that you uniquely know how to do. That hopefully society wants/needs and that you can scale up to deliver to society.

• Yourself: you don’t have to compete with anyone else. You are being yourself, playing to your natural strength and own interests means that you are going to be the best in the world in your chosen areas. And society will reward you for being the best in the world.

  Productizing yourself is about creating a clear and compelling value proposition that communicates the benefits of you and any products or services you can offer to potential clients or customers. - While easily explained, this is not an easy thing to do. Naval himself says that productizing yourself takes decades. Simply finding out what unique skills/traits you can try forming into a product could take the better half of a decade.

To productize yourself effectively, you need to start by identifying your unique skills, knowledge, and experience. You can then Ask yourself what problems you are uniquely qualified to solve, and what value you can offer to potential clients or customers. Then, develop a clear value proposition that communicates the benefits of your product or service and how it can help your target audience. This should be an ongoing process that requires constant refinement and adaptation to changing market conditions. It’s important to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies in your field, and to continually evolve your product or service to meet the changing needs of society

Productizing yourself is an effective way to establish yourself as an expert in your field and differentiate yourself from competitors; ultimately making you an irreplaceable and invaluable individual. By identifying your unique skills and packaging them into a marketable product or service, you can increase your visibility, credibility, and profitability in today’s competitive job market.

“Your work is your product. You must productize yourself.”