How to build a culture of recognition that quietly amplifies your own reputation.
My client turned to me and said, “I feel the only way to show my value is to take on more work.”
She was feeling stressed out about whether or not she was getting appropriately recognized for her contributions and the amount of things she had been doing. But, as with many product ops roles (and many product leadership roles), the work she was doing was really behind the scenes.
“I don’t want to just talk about the things that I’ve done successfully in my one-on-ones. That doesn’t seem like a good use of time, and talking about myself feels a bit gross.”
This is a core tension that I have had to grapple with as well: How do I promote and make sure that I’m bringing attention to the good work I’m doing while not feeling like I’m bragging or being too salesman-y? How do I navigate the political landscape of my workplace without becoming overly political?
The technique that I’ve developed over the years is not to look at it as self-promotion, but instead to reframe it into playing my part in creating a culture of recognition.
Here’s the important bit: building recognition isn’t charity — it’s the most credible form of self-advocacy, because the story centers on outcomes and shared wins, not on you.
Others need to know you’re doing good work
By focusing on outcomes and shared wins, you’re doing self-advocacy right. If you don’t advocate for yourself, nobody else is going to. Your manager might do a bit, but at the end of the day, if they don’t have a clear enough idea of what you’re doing and why it’s making them look good, they can’t be a big advocate for you.
If product operation work goes well, we help the product team avoid a last-minute scramble. But it’s hard to point at the fires that didn’t happen and say, “Look at the ROI of this thing that didn’t happen.”
Therefore, we need to become really good self-advocates. And to do it in a way that still feels authentic.
One of the advantages we have in Product Ops is we’re seeing so much of the work that others are doing and their work touches ours as well. By creating a culture of recognition and spending time highlighting the work that others are doing, we can tie it back to the work that we’re doing and the value we’re adding.
Become really good at highlighting the work of others as a strategy to quietly bring attention to the work that you’re doing yourself.
How to make others look great
Making others look great is a skill. It’s not “this person is awesome” spam — it’s specific, verifiable, and tied to outcomes.
Try this micro‑pattern:
- Name the person and the behavior: “Anna split the rollout into two phases.”
- State the effect with a metric or observation: “Bug reports dropped 18% in week one.”
- Connect to the system or goal: “That phased rollout is exactly what our launch checklist was designed to enable.”
A quick example: “Shoutout to Anna for phasing onboarding — splitting activation steps cut first‑week bug reports by 18%. Leo’s QA checklist made the switch painless, and the phased plan came straight out of our launch playbook. Nice teamwork.”
Do:
- Be concrete (behavior + outcome + system link).
- Attribute broadly (peers, manager, cross‑func partners).
- Move the win where it matters (thread, standup, or an upward note when it ladders to leadership goals).
- Connect it quietly to the work you’ve been doing.
Don’t:
- Praise without an outcome (“great job!”).
- Center yourself (“my framework…”).
- Let wins stall in Slack; close the loop upward when they support strategic goals.
This sets up the next move: turning specific, outcome‑linked praise into a message that travels to the right altitude.
Books on Gratitude
There’s lots of good information out there about how important gratitude can be in career development. A few of my favorites:
- Wild Courage, Jenny Wood
- Give to Grow, Mo Bunell
- Give and Take, Adam Grant
Share Wins That Travel Upward
You aren’t trying to shout about your own work; you want to make sure the right wins reach the right altitude — especially the ones that ladder directly into leadership goals.
When a project you’ve supported succeeds, don’t just celebrate it with the team. Close the loop upward. I learned this technique first from Jenny Wood, who included it in her book Wild Courage.
As she says: “Cheering every win means assigning credit liberally wherever it belongs, highlighting your team’s accomplishments.”
Let’s say you recently built a new reporting framework to make it easier for product managers to pull their own data and access insights without writing SQL queries.
A few weeks later, one of the PMs you support, Marco, sends you a message:
“That new dashboard saved us hours this week — we finally have the data we need without having to ping analytics.”
Priya is your skip-level leader — the VP of Product, who’s responsible for the broader strategic goal of improving product insight velocity across the organization.
This is your moment to craft a short message to Priya and cc your manager:
Hey Priya — wanted to share a quick win. Marco’s team just finished their first sprint using the new reporting framework, and it’s already saving about two hours a week per PM. My manager gave me great coaching to encourage smooth rollouts across the PM team.
If Marco’s example is representative across the board, with the eight PMs on our team each saving two hours, that’s 16 team hours a week reclaimed from manual SQL queries — time now spent making better product decisions. This directly supports your goal of improving product insight velocity.
You’ve now sent a message that your skip-level could drop straight into the next board deck: clear, strategic, gratitude-filled, and measurable.
Why It Works
This one note accomplishes multiple things at once:
- Celebrates someone else’s success: Marco, the PM, and his team look great.
- Connects that success to a system you created: The reporting framework.
- Attributes coaching and collaboration upward: Your manager, gets visible leadership credit.
- Translates the whole story into the skip-level’s strategic language: Insight velocity improved.
- Makes your manager look good: Every success you communicate upward reflects their ability to develop and support effective people.
You’re not saying, “Look what I built.”You’re saying, “Look how the system we built together advanced your strategy — and how my manager’s leadership made this possible.”
That subtle layering is what makes this technique powerful. There are three levels of benefit baked in:
- You elevate the person doing the work. Marco’s contribution is visible and celebrated.
- You elevate your manager. Their boss now sees tangible results from her team — a reflection of strong leadership.
- You elevate yourself. You’re the one connecting dots, amplifying wins, and reinforcing how your work aligns to organizational goals.
Instead of, “Look what I did,” the message reads as:
“Look how the system we built together advanced your strategy.”
That’s the difference between brown-nosing and leadership. It builds a recognition-driven culture.
Over time, recognition becomes predictable: a win, a clear outcome, a link to strategy. At that point, you don’t need ad‑hoc shoutouts. You need a simple playbook for visibility. The next step is to run an internal GTM.
Treat Internal Work Like a Launch
An internal go-to-market (GTM) operationalizes the recognition loop you just ran upward. It’s not “we shipped X,” it’s “here’s who enabled X and how it advanced goal Y” — delivered to the right audiences at the right altitude.
The same way product teams plan an external GTM, design an internal GTM to spread adoption of your systems by spotlighting the people succeeding within them — so wins compound and recognition becomes procedural, not political.
How this differs from “we announced the launch”:
- Outcome‑first, not feature‑first: lead with impact, then the change.
- Credit architecture: name contributors across functions and link their work to the system.
- Altitude‑aware: tailor the message so peers learn “how,” leaders see “why it advances strategy.”
- Close‑the‑loop cadence: announce, narrate, and celebrate — not a one‑off blast.
Announce, Deliver, Celebrate
Every internal GTM has three simple steps:
- Announce what’s coming – Give people a reason to care. Explain why this work matters and how it connects to a company goal. Example: “Next week, product ops will be rolling out our new experiment-tracking dashboard. Our goal is to make experimentation faster and easier across teams.”
- Deliver and narrate the journey – As the rollout happens, share updates where people already work — Slack, team meetings, internal newsletters. Tag the people who are making it successful. Example: “The growth team just ran the first experiment in the new dashboard — huge thanks to Mason and Esther for helping us spot early bugs and make the onboarding smoother.”
- Celebrate the results – Once it’s live, close the loop. Share what changed, what improved, and who made it possible. Example: “Three weeks after launch, 40% of product teams are using the new dashboard. We’re seeing faster test setup and cleaner data. Huge shoutout to the growth and analytics teams — your feedback shaped this into something better than we imagined.”
Each step of the way you’re sharing something that was not done just by you but that had an impact on the team or where somebody else supported you in it. You’re appreciating the help that you get in recognizing that there’s no way to change a product culture single-handedly.
Why It Works
Running internal GTMs changes how people talk about work. Instead of project updates that sound like checklists, you’re telling stories that show progress, gratitude, and impact. Everyone sees not just what happened, but why it matters and who made it possible.
This practice also strengthens the recognition loop:
- Team members feel proud because their names and contributions are visible.
- Social proof encourages others to adopt your solutions.
- Leaders see alignment between tactical work and strategic goals.
- You become the connective tissue — the person who builds clarity, morale, and momentum.
And when you consistently share stories of others’ wins through your systems, the reflection is inevitable: your work becomes visible because others are succeeding within it.
Help others practice praise
If you were the only one doing this at your company, you haven’t quite changed the culture in any meaningful way. But if you’re the first to start doing it and you help others get better at this skill themselves, now you’re beginning to make real progress.
This is a good habit not only to build yourself but to encourage others to develop as well. If they’re on your team, you can suggest that somebody send a note to your manager celebrating their win.
If you’re supporting another product manager in a feature launch, you can coach them through how to do the internal launch as well.
So long as everybody keeps the praise genuine and authentic, it’s hard to imagine this going wrong.
The best reputation to have
The amazing thing about this is that the more you practice recognizing others and their accomplishments in order to channel your own, the more that you get the reputation for being a strong organizational leader, whether or not you’re in a position of actual leadership.
Jenny Wood mentions in her book: “The best part about being a manager is that you never have to steal an ounce of credit. You receive full points when your team wins. A leader’s most valuable trait is bringing out greatness in others.”
Even as I wrote this article, I went and revisited my weekly update to one of my consulting clients and found three different places where I could do a better job highlighting somebody else’s work.
This reputation is far more valuable than being known as “the person who ships features” or “the PM who hit their metrics.” It turns out that demonstrating your value isn’t about showing how much you can get done. While it’s important to get the right work done in your job, more is not more.
Take a look at what your wins have been this week. Find one thing that you can turn into a thank you or highlighting somebody else’s win and share that around.