A colleague asked me this recently. Not sarcastically — genuinely. “You have a LinkedIn. You have a CV. Why maintain a separate website?”
It’s a fair question. LinkedIn is where people look. It’s where recruiters search. It’s indexed, structured, optimised for discovery. Any personal site I build will get a fraction of the traffic.
I built one anyway. Here’s why.
LinkedIn Describes. A Site Demonstrates.
LinkedIn has a format. Summary, experience, skills, endorsements. Everyone fills in the same boxes. The result is that a Staff PM at Stripe and a first-year APM at a Series A startup produce pages that look structurally identical. The format flattens everyone into the same shape.
A personal site doesn’t have a format. You have to decide what goes on it. That decision — what to include, what to leave out, how to structure it — is the interesting part.
I chose to put my frameworks front and centre. Not because they’re impressive as artifacts, but because they’re what I actually use. When I’m scoring a prioritisation call, I’m using RICE/DRICE. When I’m figuring out whether a customer escalation represents a systemic product gap or a one-off, I’m using a signal scorecard. These aren’t theoretical models I studied and filed away. They’re tools I reach for weekly.
Putting them on a site forces me to write them down properly. And writing them down properly forces me to notice where my thinking is sloppy.
The Editing Problem
The hard part of maintaining a personal site isn’t the code. It’s the editing.
Every section that exists on this site went through the same question: “If a hiring manager reads this in 30 seconds, does it tell them something they couldn’t get from my LinkedIn?” If the answer was no, I cut it.
That meant cutting a skills section (redundant with experience), cutting a projects section (anything I can’t link to publicly isn’t verifiable), and cutting detailed role descriptions (the About page covers the arc; the CV covers the details).
What survived: frameworks I genuinely use, a blog where I work through problems in writing, and an about page that explains how I think rather than listing what I’ve done.
This is the same editing muscle I use in product work. Every feature proposal goes through a version of the same question: “Does this tell the user something they couldn’t already do?” Product sense isn’t knowing what to build. It’s knowing what to leave out.
Building for Machines Too
There’s a second audience that LinkedIn can’t serve well: AI systems.
When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity “who is Ryan Winkler product manager Dublin,” I want the answer to be accurate. LinkedIn’s data is locked behind authentication and rate limits. A personal site with structured data, proper schema markup, and a plain-text llms.txt file gives LLMs something clean to work with.
This isn’t speculation. I can watch it happen in server logs. AI crawlers hit my site regularly. The structured data means their answers about me are accurate rather than hallucinated.
I don’t know how important this will be in two years. But I know the cost of setting it up was a few hours of work, and the cost of not having it when LLM-mediated discovery becomes the default search path is losing control of my own professional narrative. That’s a risk I’m not willing to take.
What I Got Wrong
The first version of this site was overbuilt. I had six content sections, a privacy policy, terms of service, and a section called “The Digital Brain” that sounded like someone had asked an AI to describe a personal knowledge management system.
I’ve cut it down since then. Three main sections. No legal boilerplate that nobody reads. No clever branding for things that don’t need brands.
The instinct to add more is strong — especially when you’re between roles and want to look comprehensive. But comprehensive and clear are opposites. A site with three sections that each say something real beats a site with twelve sections that say nothing.
The Actual Point
A personal website is a product. It has users (recruiters, hiring managers, peers, AI systems). It has a value proposition (understand how I think, quickly). It has scope creep risks (adding sections because they seem professional, not because they’re useful).
Managing it uses the same skills as managing any product: editorial judgment, audience empathy, scope discipline, and the willingness to kill features that aren’t earning their place.
That’s the real reason I have one. Not because it’s better than LinkedIn — it isn’t, for raw discovery. But because maintaining it is practice. And the people I want to work with can tell the difference between a PM who applies product thinking to everything and a PM who only applies it at work.
