iFixit has built more than a library of repair instructions.

Its tens of thousands of guides can be created, corrected, and improved by the people who use them. Contributions are tracked, authorship can be shared, and reputation accumulates as people add useful knowledge.

So someone who comes to fix a phone can leave having changed what the next person finds. The audience isn’t the endpoint here. They’re part of what’s being built.

And that’s where the visibility value comes from. When people help build something, they come back to it, talk about it, and pull others in. The organization stays visible because its audience helped make it that way.

This is “Make people part of it.”

Participation can take many forms. People might contribute knowledge, create something others can use, or help shape what comes next. The important thing is that their involvement leaves something behind. 

dbt works the same way. Its users don’t just install the software. They build open-source packages that other practitioners install and extend. What grows around it is an ecosystem the community made, not just an engagement metric.

The bigger question: What’s different because they were there?

This choice gets sharper as content gets cheaper to make. When tools can spin up another version for almost nothing, companies have to choose. Do they use the savings to make even more? Or do they spend some of it giving people a way to take part?

So ask yourself: Where could people do more than just use what you make? And what would change if they did?

How to Play

Pick one thing people already use or engage with, and give them a way to contribute to it. Let them improve it, add their own knowledge, or build something others can use. Make their contributions visible, so the next person encounters something the community helped create. Start small, but make the opportunity to participate real. A poll or comment box isn’t enough.

Cicerone created a professional qualification in beer service. Today, more than 170,000 people across more than 90 countries hold one of its certifications.

The important part is where the credential lives. People earn it, put it on their CV, and carry it into breweries, bars, restaurants, and distribution companies. They keep it when they change jobs, and anyone can verify it independently. The authority belongs to them.

Yet every time someone carries that authority into a new job, Cicerone grows stronger too. It becomes the name that defines what good beer knowledge looks like.

This is “Build through others.”

Most visibility programs run the opposite way. The company supplies the message, the person supplies the audience, and ghostwritten posts add reach but keep the exchange thin. The person matters only as a megaphone.

“Build through others” starts with a different question: what can the company give a person that stays valuable even when they’re no longer promoting it? A method, a credential, knowledge, even a professional identity. A community where their standing can grow.

The key is that the authority has to be portable. If it vanishes the moment someone leaves or stops using the approved language, the company was only leasing their visibility.

HubSpot did this with inbound. It taught a method people could get certified in and apply anywhere. That independent use is exactly where the payoff comes from. The person gains authority and the company gains a bigger world where something it created has standing.

So consider this: What could someone carry out of your organization that would make both them and you stronger?

How to Play

Think about something your organization knows or does particularly well. Could you turn it into a method others can apply, a tool they can use, or a qualification they can earn? Make it valuable enough that people would want to take it with them, even if they no longer worked with you. Give it a recognizable identity, and let people make it their own.

Backblaze runs hundreds of thousands of hard drives. That gives it a view of how and when drives fail that almost no one writing about the topic can match.

Since 2013, the company has published what it sees. In a single quarter of 2026, its stats covered more than 340,000 drives and roughly 30 million drive-days, and it makes the raw data public so others can look at it themselves.

The result has traveled far beyond Backblaze’s own blog. The company says the dataset has been used in more than 100 academic papers and machine-learning projects. Note the progression: everyday operations create evidence, the company publishes it, and others test, challenge, and build on it.

That is “Publish what only you can see.”

There are different ways to be useful as a source. One way is resolution: being unusually clear and authoritative about something you’re entitled to answer, just like good documentation. However, resolution rarely makes you stand out. Some other company can answer the same question just as clearly as you did.

Scarcity is different. It comes from where you stand. What failures cross your desk? What do you see in your transactions, your operating data, or your experiments that only becomes visible because you see more of it? Organizations generate huge amounts of this material and keep most of it locked inside. Publishing it changes the basis of visibility.

Hotwire’s State of AI Search in B2B research works the same way. Earlier in this report we drew on a mass of more than a million AI answers, because Hotwire sits inside enough AI-search activity to see something an outside commentator simply couldn’t reproduce.

The same scarce evidence works on machines and people for different reasons. Machines retrieve it because it’s spelled out. People remember where it came from, because the source is part of why it exists at all. Over time, people start to connect the knowledge with you. 

The catch is that this kind of material rarely sits neatly inside a marketing/comms plan. It may take data extraction, methodology, legal review, or engineers. That friction is part of the value. Because if it were as easy as writing another opinion piece, someone else would do it.

Think about it: What can your organization know because it stands somewhere no one else does?

How to Play

Look for something your company knows because of the work it does. Perhaps it’s a pattern in your customer data, an observation from years of experience, or something you’ve learned through trial and error. Find the evidence, and publish it in a form others can examine and use. Be open about how you arrived at your findings. And here’s a useful test: if a competitor could produce the same piece using publicly available information, you probably haven’t found your most valuable material yet.

37signals published Shape Up as a book about product development.

But it was more than the book. Terms like appetite, bets, betting table, and shaping gave teams smaller pieces they could carry into their own work. You could ask “what’s our appetite for this?” without reproducing the whole argument. Other companies now describe themselves as adopting or adapting Shape Up.

That is “Make yourself carryable.”

Visibility rarely travels in the shape you made it. A report gets reduced to a single statistic. An article becomes a sentence within a message. Or a presentation becomes a screenshot. Every journey usually gets compressed.

What survives that compression often has a recognizable core. There’s some distinction, a phrase, a diagram you can redraw, a number you remember. Something simple enough to repeat, but specific enough to stay useful once the context has vanished.

A job title can do this too. Forward Deployed Engineer started as a role at Palantir and has spread well beyond it. Other technology companies, including OpenAI, now use the title for engineers who work closely with customers and feed what they learn back into the product. The term escaped its originator because other organizations found it useful.

That’s the power and the cost of carryability. Once language really travels, it stops being exclusively yours. Competitors adopt it, attribution weakens, and the market forgets where it began. But something else happens too. Future conversations start further ahead, because a distinction you helped establish has become part of how other people think.

The challenge is to make your ideas useful enough to spread, and distinctive enough that some recognition of where they came from survives.

Campaign culture makes this hard. It rewards the next new line before the last one becomes anyone’s language. Carryability asks for the opposite: repeat something long enough that other people learn to use it.

So now, ask yourself: What would you still want circulating about your organization if the original article, deck, or campaign disappeared?

How to Play

Take one of your strongest ideas and imagine someone mentioning it in a meeting without having your article or presentation in front of them. What would they remember? Could they explain it in a sentence? Would anyone know where it came from?

Try giving the idea a recognizable name, a memorable distinction, or a simple visual form. Test it with people who haven’t seen the original. And once you’ve found something that sticks, keep using it. People need time to make your language their own.

Thoughtworks published the first Technology Radar in 2010, and has kept publishing it for more than a decade.

That history is what gives it force. Technology showing up today isn’t an isolated opinion. Readers can see whether it’s new, whether Thoughtworks changed its mind, and where it fits in a long line of past calls. The movement itself becomes information.

That is “Build a record that compounds.”

An organization can publish every week for ten years and build nothing like it. The content calendar makes that easy: the unit is the next empty slot, and once it’s filled, attention moves on.

A record works differently, because the entries depend on each other. Questions come back. Methods stay recognizable. Predictions can be checked against earlier ones. The individual piece still matters; it just no longer arrives alone.

The first Radar entry stood on its own. By the fiftieth, there were years of past calls to compare it to. At some point this flips. Early on, each new entry builds the record. Later, the record is what makes each new entry worth trusting.

Stack Overflow’s Developer Survey, run every year since 2011, has some of the same quality. Even as its methodology changes, each new edition joins a visible decade of what developers use, learn, and think.

This is different from just keeping a chronology. A feed or an archive preserves what happened, but neither necessarily compounds. A record compounds when earlier material changes the value of what comes next. That needn’t be slow, only stable enough that the past stays useful.

Generative tools make it easier than ever to fill the next publishing slot. Which may make the opposite question the valuable one: What are you observing now that would matter even more if you were still observing it three years from now?

How to Play

Choose a question you’ll still care about in three years. Decide what you’ll observe, measure, or document each time, and commit to returning to it. Keep the format consistent enough that people can compare one edition with another. Don’t hide your earlier findings, including the predictions that turned out wrong. Over time, the history itself becomes valuable. Each new installment should give people a reason to revisit what came before.

The Leica M11-P changed something about the moment a photo is taken.

It became the first production camera to attach Content Credentials right at capture, so information about where an image came from stays with it and remains checkable as the image moves around and gets edited. The feature makes sense because an old assumption has broken. A photo used to mean a camera had been there. A voice meant someone had spoken. Writing told you something about who made it.

Appearance no longer gives us that confidence. A synthetic image can look photographed. A generated voice can sound human. Polished writing tells us little about how it was made. This is where “Prove what’s real” begins.

The answer isn’t to make everything by hand. And not everything needs a stamp of origin. But origin matters when knowing how something was made changes what it means: a documentary photo, a piece of craftsmanship, a responsible-sourcing claim, a human performance. In those cases, how it looks may not be enough.

The proof has to be checkable, and it has to travel with the thing itself. Images get copied, products resold, content edited. If the proof lives only on your website or in the original explanation, it vanishes the moment the thing leaves.

Chloé’s digital product passports apply the same idea to physical goods. Starting with its Summer 2023 collection, the company built unique IDs into its products that customers can scan to check authenticity and trace where they came from. That same passport can support care, repair, and resale over the object’s whole life.

The trail stays attached to the object, not the campaign. That means the connection to the brand and the evidence behind its claims can survive long after the original marketing has disappeared.

But this kind of proof has limits. It doesn’t prove truth, quality, or worth. A photo with a flawless origin trail can still mislead. A fully traceable product can still be bad. This answers a narrower question: Where did this come from, and what happened to it? Sometimes that matters enormously, and sometimes it doesn’t.

How to Play

Start by asking where knowing the origin of something would genuinely change its value. A documentary image, a handcrafted product, a claim about responsible sourcing. What would someone need to verify, and what evidence could you provide?

Then make sure that evidence stays with the thing itself, even when it’s copied, edited, forwarded, or resold. And be precise about what your proof establishes. Authenticity, provenance, and quality aren’t necessarily the same thing.