Keren Baruch (PM Director, LinkedIn): How Creators Can Thrive on LinkedIn
Advice from LinkedIn's creator product lead for LinkedIn creators
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Dear subscribers,
What better way to learn how to grow on LinkedIn than from the platform’s creator product lead?
Keren Baruch is Director of Product for LinkedIn’s creator efforts. Since 2021, Keren’s team has launched countless tools to help creators reach LinkedIn’s 900M+ members.
I spoke to Keren about:
How LinkedIn’s creator efforts got started
How creators can succeed on LinkedIn
How creators can get ready for the AI revolution
How LinkedIn’s creator efforts got started
Welcome Keren! Let’s go back to when you launched LinkedIn’s “Creator Mode” in 2021. Is that when LinkedIn started focusing on creators?
I have fond memories from launching Creator Mode but our strategy to amplify voices started over a decade ago in 2012. That’s when we unveiled LinkedIn’s Influencer Program to help business leaders and creators share insights with our members.
Since then, we’ve introduced many creator tools such as LinkedIn Live and LinkedIn Newsletters. We also built a Community Management team to help our creators feel supported and informed.
LinkedIn’s vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. How does the creator team ladder up to this vision?
Our team mission is to help voices be successful and to unlock opportunities for them.
We’re building LinkedIn to be the best platform for creators to:
Have high-quality conversations in a relevant and safe professional context.
Find opportunities to network with each other and grow their personal brand.
Engage with brands and institutions.
We believe that helping creators share insights also helps to unlock economic opportunity for our 900M+ members.
How do you decide what to build next for creators?
Our roadmap is informed by many factors, including:
Creator feedback. We listen to creators through our Community Management team. I’ve also personally spoken to 100+ creators.
LinkedIn’s vision. We evaluate products based on their potential to unlock economic opportunity for every member.
What’s the hardest part about building for creators at LinkedIn?
The hardest part is working on features that creators want right now but take time to get right.
For example, in every call that we had, creators expressed a need for more analytics. But there are alot of factors involved in shipping an effective data product. So we had to keep creators waiting while we iterated on our analytics suite.
How creators can succeed on LinkedIn
Many top creators have told me that they regret not getting started on LinkedIn sooner. What’s your advice for creators who want to grow on the platform?