#65 The city that taught me to take up space

A year ago, a guy named Arthur cold-DM'd me on LinkedIn.

He was building a CTV platform called Vibe. He needed a founding product marketer in New York. I said yes.

I want to tell you what happened.

London taught me to shrink.

I spent years working at startups there. Scrappy, ambitious, genuinely exciting companies. I gave everything. I had opinions, strategies, a point of view on the market. I worked on launches. I built frameworks. I rewrote positioning from scratch.

I never got promoted. I was rarely told I was doing well. And after a while, without even realizing it, I stopped saying what I actually thought. I started feeling neglected and worthless.

That's not a London problem specifically. It's a culture thing. A startup stage thing. Maybe a me thing. But it was real.

I internalized a version of marketing where you do the work quietly and hope someone notices. Where self-advocacy feels embarrassing.

New York doesn't have time for that.

Within my first few months at Vibe, I led a brand awareness play: subway station takeovers across NYC and SF. I didn't soft-pedal it. I walked in with a point of view and I said: this is what we should do.

A year in, I got promoted to Director of Brand and Product Marketing.

Here's what shifted for me, and why I think it's worth talking about on a PMM newsletter:

Showing your work is not bragging. It's strategy.

Nobody is tracking your output as closely as you are. Your manager has 15 other things to think about (especially when he’s the CEO). If you build something good and don't name it, contextualize it, and connect it to a business outcome, it evaporates. You get credit for being busy.

I started treating visibility like a deliverable. A launch doesn't end when it goes live. It ends when the right people understand what it was, why it mattered, and who made it happen.

Saying what you think is the job, not a perk.

Here's the thing about product marketing specifically: we're the people who are supposed to have a point of view on the market. If we're hedging in internal meetings, we're already failing at the job. Customers don't buy from brands that are unsure of themselves.

Confidence is not a personality trait. It's a practice.

I didn't become more confident because New York is magic or because Vibe is a great team (though it is). I became more confident because I stopped waiting for evidence that I deserved to be confident before acting like it.

I don't know if you're in a place where you're shrinking right now. Maybe you're in a company that doesn't reward visibility. Maybe you've been burned by having an opinion. Maybe you've been doing brilliant work in complete silence and wondering why nothing is moving.

If that's you: start naming what you build. Say the thing you're thinking in the meeting. Stop waiting for the environment to change before you do.

It doesn't always work. But it worked for me.