Like many tech execs, Dropbox’s VP of product and growth agrees that job seekers should still learn basic technical skills — but his No. 1 piece of advice is to “show your work.”
Morgan Brown told Business Insider that it’s about showcasing your capabilities, rather than showing how you arrived at an answer.
“Publish your stuff, publish your thinking,” Brown said in an interview. “Build the apps, build the websites.”
Brown said he would give that advice at any time, but it’s especially relevant in the age of AI. In a time where there’s an abundance of free tools and online courses, Brown said there’s nothing stopping job seekers from building products on their own. All candidates need to get started is a phone and internet access, Brown said.
“There are so many opportunities to kind of, like, show what you have to offer right now without kind of any credential necessary other than just your work,” Brown said.
The Dropbox product exec said that when he suggests building a product, people sometimes say that they don’t know enough or don’t have good ideas. That shouldn’t be a deterrent, Brown said.
“First of all, no one’s paying any attention,” Brown said, adding that you can “learn by doing” and eventually create a body of work to point to that some people will end up noticing.
Brown said his advice comes from the perspective of someone who isn’t a “classically trained product manager.” Despite spending years in product management at Facebook, Instagram, and Shopify, the now Dropbox VP didn’t have a typical start to the realm of Big Tech. In fact, he didn’t finish his college degree until a few years ago.
“I was a biology major, you know, I failed out of college. It took me 20 years to get my degree,” Brown said.
After dropping out of school, Brown started his first job in data operations at a startup in the midst of the dot-com boom. It was a time before the rise of APIs, and the bulk of his work started with typing information from physical newspapers. He said search engine optimization had recently emerged, and he had to figure out how to get web traffic.
“I basically was a self-taught digital marketer, fully based on like what kind of impact we could have,” Brown said. “And then from there I went to digital marketing.”
In addition to learning how to generate traffic, Brown ended up teaching himself how to create a website and blog, and eventually how to build products. While Brown said he’s grateful for the experience and where it led him, he said he learned what he knows now “at the school of hard knocks” and experienced “a lot of failure along the way.”
He went from publishing his thoughts online to co-authoring a published book called “Hacking Growth,” a guide for driving growth. He said putting his work out there led people to find him and ultimately created opportunities.
“There’s nothing stopping anyone from publishing and showing their work,” Brown said. “And I think more people that do that, that’s where good stuff happens.”
