Purposeful Personal Brand with Cassandra Faris

Matty talks with Cassandra Faris, who runs community for KubeCampus, a free Kubernetes training product, about building a personal brand on purpose. Cassandra began in tech as a recruiter, has a philosophy degree, and went on to manage communities around SaltStack, a financial project and now people learning Kubernetes. The cold open is Cassandra: "the more you do that and the more you reach out and help other people as well, the stronger your brand is, the stronger your reputation is, the more success you have." You Already Have One Cassandra's practical case is that a brand helps a career: speaking invitations come from what people know of Cassandra's work, and for jobs "the resume is kind of a formality at this point." Even an individual contributor needs some online presence so people can see what they're about. Matty adds that you have a brand whether you want one or not, since it's what people think of when they think of you, such as the SRE everyone asks about replicas, or the colleague who is difficult to work with. Matty brings up the Mad Men line, "if you don't like what people are saying about you, change the conversation," and says that we have some responsibility to take ownership of it. From Accidental to Purposeful Cassandra's own brand started by accident. As a recruiter told not to be the one who doesn't know Java from JavaScript, Cassandra went to Agile and cloud meetups, then followed everyone tweeting the #CodeMash hashtag, listened for a while, and started to participate, posting job search tips and skills advice. Developers turned out to welcome a recruiter as long as Cassandra was authentic and not working an angle, and invitations to panels, talks and conference organizing followed. Cassandra realized that being deliberate about what was posted could work in Cassandra's favor, hence the talk on a purposeful personal brand. Matty's version: at Chef, Matty was known for infrastructure as code, and at PagerDuty, where incident response was the focus, nobody knew Matty for that despite years of doing it as a job. So for a year Matty took any stage to talk about incident response, blameless postmortems and learning from incidents. Matty insists that this wasn't inventing a persona, it was deciding what to be known for. When Matty's boss later asked for the same reputation in the ITIL and IT service management world, Matty's answer was that "you can't just decide to have authenticity." It takes time, and you have to be able to back it up. Cassandra says every role change means updating, not rebranding: the human skills of building relationships with a community's key leaders are the same whether the community is open source contributors or Microsoft MVPs. Your Brand Inside a Big Company Matty notes that almost nobody stays at one big employer for 20 years, so external brand matters even in roles that aren't public, and asks how it works inside an organization like Target or Visa. Cassandra says to choose opportunities that match who you are: not competitive, cutthroat cultures if you aren't competitive, and plenty of room for creativity if you need it. Matty adds that the tension is credit: talking about what the team did as well as what you did, since a story that is all about I doesn't show a team member, and ops roles are like a corporate lawyer, where nobody knows what you do until you don't do it. "If you don't, who's going to do it for you?" Nine times out of ten, Matty says, you think you're bragging and you aren't. Three Questions and Framing Accomplishments Cassandra suggests writing down answers to three questions, which are in the slides linked below. Who are you professionally: your top three technical specialties, three professional specialties and three contributions to the team and profession. Who are you personally: three interests and hobbies, three beliefs and values, and three parts of your social, family or community life you want to connect over. And how do you connect with people: shared interests, advice you're seeking and what you want to know about others. That gives you a bank of material. "Modesty isn't a career-enhancing trait, but that doesn't mean be an asshole." The trick is to frame accomplishments by who they helped. Cassandra's example is a KubeCampus Kubernetes Learning Day that sold out and gave 200 people an introduction to Kubernetes, which reads as "it helped all of these people" and not as bragging. Give credit to the team, and practice, even in a mirror. Show, Don't Tell Matty says the quickest way to get mocked on tech Twitter is to put thought leader in your bio, and recalls putting up a page of DevOps thought leaders a decade ago until J. Paul Reed asked to be taken off it. If you solve a problem, the story should be about the interesting way it was solved, and the expertise comes through. Matty also recommends keeping a brag book, an Evernote notebook of kind messages that started as a cure for imposter syndrome at Chef and turned out to help at performance review time and with seeing what's worth telling. Matty's DevRel team writes a monthly wrap-up for the company, framed around why it's useful to sales and others, and not as a pat on the back: "how do you brag by giving someone something useful?" Making Time and Choosing Platforms Cassandra keeps an hour blocked on the calendar every morning for social media, takes a day or two off the internet after a conference to avoid burnout, and pays attention to whether the people and things followed make things feel psychologically unsafe, since that makes content hard to produce. Platforms are shifting as Twitter usage declines: short-form video is growing, and Cassandra sees a generational split where Gen Z and younger millennials want to connect on Instagram while everyone else uses LinkedIn. The brand can stay the same while the tools change, so it helps to be on several. Matty suggests blogging may have a renaissance, especially documenting what you're doing or learning in the open. Matty's most visited page is a post on configuring SharePoint in a one-way trust, written to document a fix for a team, which became the answer on an MSDN forum. Matty tells of Annie, who learned an infrastructure testing tool in public on a blog until the product team said "Annie's blog is our documentation now." Beginner content is the hardest to create and the most needed, Matty says, since hundreds of thousands of people need to install Kubernetes and only a dozen need to optimize sharding at a million users per second. Teaching also helps you learn. Vulnerability, Asking and Paying It Forward Cassandra is seven months into a role at KubeCampus, is teaching the networking fundamentals lab, and plans a blog series on the learning journey. "It starts with admitting you don't know." Nobody has ever responded by doubting Cassandra knows what a cluster is, they've offered to explain it. Cassandra's tip for new brand builders is to ask a question or for resources about something you want to learn, since developers love to share knowledge. Matty adds that asking for help to learn is different from asking someone to do a task, and appreciation matters without genuflecting: "I'm not going to carry the bucket for you," but I'll give you a map, and sometimes you just need the bucket carried and can ask for that favor. Cassandra says helping people isn't transactional but pay-it-forward: Cassandra can't hire a former boss and mentor who is looking for a director of DevRel role, so the return on that help is paying it forward, and Cassandra passes the same knowledge on to others. Matty says to ask few favors and accept no, and that you don't need to go to the most famous expert every time, since thousands of people know Kubernetes. Cassandra's answer is meetups and conferences, where the hallway track has led to meeting an author whose Kubernetes book now helps, and a KubeCampus Slack for when learners get stuck. Links to Resources Mentioned Keep a Brag Book KubeCampus: Free Kubernetes Training Purposeful Personal Branding - Nov 2018 Slides 13-15 have the 3 questions *DevOps World is back for 2023, and you won't want to miss out on this one-of-a-kind event! This year's program is packed with exclusive insights, immersive workshops, and unparalleled networking opportunities taking place across multiple cities in the US, UK, and Asia. Elevate your DevOps game and register using the following links: [NYC area](https://reg.rainfocus.com/flow/cloudbees/devopsnyc/webinar3/page/landing), [Chicago](https://reg.rainfocus.com/flow/cloudbees/devopschicago/webinar3/page/landing), [Silicon Valley](https://reg.rainfocus.com/flow/cloudbees/devopssiliconv/webinar3/page/landing), [Singapore](https://reg.rainfocus.com/flow/cloudbees/devopssingapore/webinar3/page/landing), and [London](https://reg.rainfocus.com/flow/cloudbees/devopslondon/webinar3/page/landing).*