You Are the Product

I walked into a friend’s meeting thinking I was just tagging along to lunch.

My friend invited me to stop by a creative agency office in DUMBO before we grabbed food, one of those warm, crafty spaces that instantly makes you feel like you’re inside a real creative world again. The kind of office where everyone somehow looks both exhausted and deeply alive.

My friend was about to kick off an impact project with the team there. I wasn’t part of it. I wasn’t “prepared.” I was just there because we were catching up beforehand, and she asked if I wanted to come along.

And then the CEO casually asked me:“So what exactly do you do?”

I froze.

It wasn't a “I need a polished answer” froze. Like, full buffering froze. Like my mind erased every TED Talk, every coaching prompt, every practiced elevator pitch I’ve ever rehearsed. In that moment, the question didn’t feel theoretical. It felt personal. It felt exposing.

My friend, thankfully, jumped in to save me. 

“She basically does everything,” she laughed. “Creative. Marketing. Operations. Design. Chief-of-staff energy.”

And I smiled, grateful and slightly horrified that someone else could explain my value faster than I could. Afterward, my friend told me, “We have to practice that answer for you.”

And I knew she was right. That night, I kept thinking about something a friend once told me after leaving her job with absolutely no plan for what came next. She had spent years marketing brands when a mentor finally told her, “You are the product,” and at the time, I remember thinking it sounded vaguely profound in the way a lot of career advice sounds vaguely profound.

But then she actually did it. She marketed herself like the brands that she once worked for, and eventually she landed what became her dream role.

For some reason, though, when she gave me the same advice her mentor gave, “you are the product,” I had no idea where to start.

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I had been training a new marketing lead to take over a project I had been working on, and we started hopping on calls so I could explain the context, walk through the systems, share what had worked, what hadn’t, where friction existed, what resources mattered, and what I would change.

One call turned into another, then another, then another. Hours across the week. And after every conversation, he kept saying some version of:

“This is the most informative conversation I’ve had.”

“This gives me the most to work with.”

Then, after a meeting in person, he came back and told me, “I have twenty minutes to convince you to come back.”

And honestly, more than flattering, it fascinated me because it reminded me of the Netflix “keeper test” I had read about years ago, the idea that strong teams don’t just passively let highly valuable people walk away. They try to keep them.

It made me realize how often this happens everywhere once you start paying attention.

At an event I attended, Indra Nooyi once shared a story about going on leave and how a client paused a project because they specifically wanted her. I’ve shifted production timelines around videographers because we wanted that person on-site and not a replacement. Not because of ego. Because of trust. Because when somebody consistently makes things better, people remember.

And weirdly, around the same time, there was another much smaller moment that taught me just as much.

I had been asked to step into a meeting to play a short video for a team. That was my task. Bring laptop. Play a sixty-second clip. Leave.

I showed the video, everyone nodded, conversation started flowing, and I immediately had that internal panic: “okay, I should probably leave now” because I technically wasn’t invited to the meeting itself, just the task attached to it.

But it also felt strange to stand up mid-conversation and walk out, so I stayed quietly while everyone talked. Then, at some point, I had an idea. Nothing groundbreaking. Just a small:“Wait… what if we tried this?”

So I shared it. They shut it down pretty quickly. Not harshly, just not the direction. Then another thought popped into my head, so I shared again. They shut that one down, too.

Something shifted for me in that moment. Because I realized I wasn’t sharing to prove anything. I wasn’t trying to take control of the room. I was sharing because I cared. Because I was already there. Because if there was even a 5% chance it helped, it felt worth offering.

At the end, they asked me to send the video. I did. And then I realized no one had written anything down, so I sent a quick follow-up with notes and next steps, too.

That moment stayed with me because it clarified something I’ve done instinctively for years:

• Good work often looks like staying a little longer than required.

• Contributing even when no one asked.

• Trying, even when the idea isn’t perfect.

• Making things easier for the people in the room.

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I was sitting with a team talking through why a project wasn’t converting the way everyone expected, despite great press, strong storytelling, recognizable names attached, and all the external credibility markers that, theoretically, should have made it obvious.

And suddenly, I could feel the hesitation point. Not intellectually like some business framework on a slide deck. Tangibly.

People believed the mission. They believed the problem was real. They believed the project sounded helpful. But somewhere between “this is interesting” and actually committing to it, something stalled because the real question people were quietly asking themselves was:

Okay… but will this work in my life?

And once I could feel that friction point, I couldn’t unsee it anymore. So I went home and stayed up until 2:30 AM writing ideas because suddenly the problem felt alive instead of theoretical.

Then, while researching designers and creatives for the kind of storytelling the strategy would require, another realization hit me almost instantly. I was scanning portfolios in maybe thirty seconds. Sometimes less. I was evaluating people through signals before meeting them.

This profile didn’t use the tools I needed. This one has a different style. This one shared weird stories that just didn’t fit the brand, but totally rad for someone else. This one was super awesome, but honestly, their work was so cool that they probably would never work on this project.

And suddenly, my friend’s advice finally landed in a completely different way.

Oh. YOU are the product.

Increasingly, people discover your thinking before they ever meet you. Your taste. Your instincts. Your energy. Your work. Whether you care. Whether your work feels alive.

The people getting opportunities weren’t always the people endlessly applying online. A lot of them were simply visible.

Earlier in my career, I once emailed a boss, laying out everything I had been doing and asking for a raise and promotion. I remember feeling frustrated afterward because their response was basically: stop focusing so much on arguing your value and keep doing undeniable work.

At the time, I felt completely deflated by that answer. Like, okay, cool, awesome, love that. So I’m just supposed to quietly hope someone notices??? I finally understood what they meant.

There’s a kind of work that becomes undeniable over time. The kind where people try to keep you. Create space for you. Move timelines around you. Find a budget for you. Not because you demanded importance, but because people trust you.

And somewhere inside all of this, I think I finally admitted something to myself, too.

I’m not really motivated by climbing a corporate ladder. What genuinely energizes me is helping story-driven creative people bring ideas into the world in a way that actually lands. I care about the invisible work. I care about protecting the story throughout execution. I care about helping meaningful things reach people instead of quietly dying inside brainstorming meetings and Google Docs.

And weirdly, somewhere in the middle of all of this, I kept thinking about something my mentor Fiona showed me years ago during an internship. She introduced me to this Japanese concept called ikigai, the idea that meaningful work tends to exist at the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what people will actually pay you for.

At the time, I remember thinking it was beautiful in the way a lot of concepts are beautiful when you’re twenty and screenshotting quotes on Pinterest you only half understand. But lately I’ve been thinking about it differently, realizing maybe that’s all I’ve actually been trying to figure out this whole time. Not a perfect title or a clean elevator pitch, but this quieter pattern underneath my life where I keep getting pulled toward the same kinds of rooms, the same kinds of people, and the same kinds of problems I strangely don’t mind staying up until 2:30 AM thinking about.

It’s strange looking back and realizing how many versions of the same lesson had been showing up in completely different corners of my life for years before I fully noticed it.

• The friend who left her job with no plan and became visible through her work.

• The people teams try to keep.

• The videographers everyone quietly reorganizes around.

• The instinct to stay after the task is technically finished.

• The strange feeling of scanning somebody’s portfolio for thirty seconds and immediately understanding whether their work feels alive.

Maybe that’s all I’ve been circling this whole time. Not the perfect title or introduction, but the quieter intersection between the work that feels most natural to me and the work other people need.