If you are like me, you have probably thought to yourself what does a manager even do? Doesn’t a manager just tell their team what to do? What’s so complicated about that?

As it turns out, team organization is much more complicated than I realized and there are several tools that are used to hold a cohesive team together. In my Applied Integrated Marketing Communications class at WWU, I had the opportunity to learn what it takes to be a manager. In this role, I oversaw a team of 5 other students where we rebuilt a podcast talking to alumni of the marketing program. During this time I was finally able to make use of the practices I had learned about and implement them in a real-world environment.

What I Did

This fall I managed a team of 5 content creators in creating and running a Tik Tok social media campaign. We built this campaign based on the needs of our client (marketing program), executed, and analyzed our work. We collaborated every week with each other, brainstorming using sticky notes to eliminate group influence. During our production we practiced the sprint development life cycle in two-week increments. How we started the sprints were with the practice of lean meetings and the use of Kanbans. These helped me and my team stay organized and allow for tasks to be pulled by individuals instead of pushing tasks on to them.

Why?

This falls under my efforts of differentiating myself, getting out of my comfort zone, and building confidence. In this blog I’ll talk about the three biggest benefits of creating a speaking explainer video for your personal brand and how it can excel you in your career search.

Pre-Personal Brand

Before taking IMC in the summer of 2022, I tried to grow my brand as a photographer by solely showcasing my work. On the surface this is all I knew and what I was taught from others. Constantly reaching out to brands for work hoping they would like my style and would hire me. The problem was they knew nothing about me and my vision, all I had was my work to show and they didn’t know who they were hiring as a person/brand. It makes sense why this wasn’t successful –– what if my values don’t match theirs? What if our visions don’t match? These were questions that are highly dependent on whether I’d be a good fit or not.

Creating our product, Marketing by the Minute, from pre-production, production, post-production and finally promotion was so much fun that I decided to take on the role of Product Manager this quarter, where I managed my own production team through Agile project management. Here are a few lessons I learned as a Product Manager.

A Hero’s Unsung Journey:

During the early stages of developing my introductory video, I had the vision to tell my life story. I had it all planned out- a video montage of how I got to where I am academically and professionally. I wanted to be the hero of my story, and show the world (or those who happen to come across my video) the resilience, grit, and perseverance that has gotten me to where I am. I was halfway through editing my video, and then realized- this information was already on my about page and did not showcase the things I could do as a marketer. I decided to scrap that idea- my personal story will be told in a different place and for another time.

This Hero’ is a Marketer and has many tools in her arsenal.

What is a brand kit? A brand kit is a term that refers to a brand’s visual identity- it’s how brands distinguish and differentiate themselves as well as to maintain brand consistency- consistency aids brand recall.

Okay, now on to the fun stuff: