How to Productize Your Career

Hey, it’s Janel.

Over the past 14 months, I’ve been sitting in on juicy closed-door conversations among CFOs, investors, and other tech execs as part of my fractional role at The Circle by Founders Circle Capital.

And I’ve got to say, I wish I’d learned a specific vocabulary a lot earlier in my career: the vocabulary of Product.

When CFOs talk about their product, they talk about pricing, packaging, and positioning. Yes, marketing and branding is part of that, but what it’s really about is how value gets structured and delivered.

At some point, I realized how different this sounds from the way we’re taught to think about our careers.

Careers are still framed through identity language: titles, roles, ladders, companies, categories. We’re trained to answer “What do you do?” as a declaration of self, not as a description of function. Years of experience, pattern recognition, and skill-building get compressed into a single label, and that label slowly becomes ingrained within us as the boundary of what’s possible.

Over time, that creates a fusion (and confusion) between identity and work. Careers stop being something we do and start becoming something we are. Roles become internalized, our titles become our containers. And, consequently, changing our jobs/containers/identities feels way too big, too self-destructive.

This is why so many career pivots feel existential instead of practical: we register them as threats to our identity instead of what they really are: product design decisions.

But there’s another way to look at this:

What if a career isn’t an identity structure at all?
What if it’s a product structure?

A product isn’t who you are, it’s something you build, shape, and continue to refine. It’s a way of organizing value so it can move through the world in different forms.

Walk with me: