What has my attention
The question I am chewing on
What is the best method to showcase who I am and what I am good at?
I am currently looking for my next job opportunity. It is forcing me to figure out the best ways to standout and showcase the value I bring. In a world of wide spread use of AI in a professional context, what are the areas where I can stand out and showcase my humanity. There’s a wide middle where a machine is faster than I am, and a narrow band where judgment is the entire job. Looking to explore this more and bring more humanity to the work I do.
What I am building
Two things, with one undertone.
My personal landing page cwagner.co came off Carrd at the end of July and went live as a static Astro site. It sounds like a weekend project, and mostly it was, except that rebuilding it forced me to say in public what I’m actually looking for. Next is moving ImpromptBrü off Obsidian Publish onto the same setup, reusing the components I already built. The quieter one is my Obsidian vault, which has turned into the backend for everything I write and a fair amount of how I think.
Reading, and why
I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything, by Joanna Stern.
I like Joanna’s sharp opinions and looking forward to seeing what she got up to…
Changed my mind about
How I introduce myself.
For years I led with the scientist who became a product manager, because the progression felt like it needed justifying and the science was the part I could prove. Then three people told me independently, over about six weeks, that my profile read as research rather than product. One of them, a recruiter, hit the phrase “de facto product manager” and asked me straight out whether I was or wasn’t. That one stung enough to stick. My expertise as a scientist is real, however I don’t have to frame everything else through it. It lends credibility, but it’s no longer the headline, and I had the order backwards.
This is a now page, so it is replaced rather than added to. There is no history and no archive of previous versions, which is the whole idea. If it has gone stale, the age above will say so before I do. The summary of me is at cwagner.co; the thinking underneath it is the rest of this notebook.