The first ten things to write down
A blank page is a bad question. Ten specific things to write, in order, with the difference between a line that answers and one that sounds fine.
The hardest part of having a page is the first hour, and the reason is not the software. It is that nobody can answer the question what do you know. Faced with a box, people write something that sounds like a profile, which is to say nothing anyone would ask about.
So here are ten things to write instead. Specific ones. If you do the first three, your page is already useful, and the rest can arrive over a month.
The three that do most of the work
One thing you believe that your field mostly disagrees with
Not a hot take. A position you have actually defended in a room, and paid for. Mine is that hiring someone brilliant who cannot be argued with costs more than the empty seat did, and I have been wrong about that twice and right about it five times.
This is the single most asked about kind of thing on any page. It is also the only one a stranger cannot get anywhere else, because it is the one people leave off their profile.
One rule you have from something going badly
The format that works is what happened, then what you do now. Not the whole war story, and not the moral without the event.
We shipped a rewrite over a holiday because the calendar looked empty. Nobody senior was around when the migration stalled. Now I do not ship anything structural in the last two weeks of December, whatever the calendar says.
That is a lesson. It is useful to a stranger, impossible to argue with, and it took ninety seconds to write.
The way you actually do the thing you are hired for
How you run the first week. How you decide what not to build. How you tell someone their work is not good enough. Write it the way you would tell it to somebody joining on Monday, in steps, including the boring parts.
People worry that giving away their method costs them work. It does the opposite. Your method is the thing you repeat in every first call for free, and it is the thing nobody can convincingly copy, because they would have to have done it.
The seven that fill it out
- A second belief, from a different corner of your work. Two beliefs make a shape, one makes a slogan.
- A second lesson, from something that went well for a reason you can name. Survivors are allowed to teach too.
- The thing juniors in your field get wrong most, and what to do instead.
- Something you changed your mind about in the last three years, with what changed it. This one gets quoted more than anything else I have written.
- Your current role, in one line, with when it started. Not the whole history yet. The one line is what the page needs to answer where are they now.
- One project you would actually talk about at length, with what it was for and what it cost.
- What you want to be asked about. Write it as a sentence, not a list of tags. It shapes the questions people send you.
A good line and a bad line
The difference is nearly always specificity, and it shows up fastest in a comparison.
Bad: I believe in strong communication and transparency with teams.
Good: I tell a team the numbers before I know what they mean. The version where I wait until I have a story is the version where they find out from someone else and stop believing me.
The first one could be on anybody's page. The second one could only be on yours, which is the whole point, and notice it is barely longer.
Bad: I have deep experience scaling engineering organisations.
Good: I have taken two teams from six people to about forty. Both times the thing that broke first was who decides, not the code.
If you cannot tell which of yours is which, read it and ask whether a reasonably smart person could have written it without having done your job. If they could, it is the first kind.
Do not write all ten today
The instinct is to fill the page in a sitting so it looks finished. Resist it, for a reason that goes beyond taste: things written to fill a page are the ones you will not defend later, and your page quotes you.
Write three. Put the address somewhere people can reach it. Then let the questions do the work: the ones your page cannot answer come back to you as a queue, in the asker's own words, and each one takes a minute to answer properly. Two weeks of answering real questions will get you a better page than any afternoon of writing into a box.
If you would rather be asked than face a blank box at all, the page will interview you. It asks one question at a time, in shapes that are easy to finish, and nothing it drafts becomes yours until you have said yes to the exact words.