A REAL QUESTION
How do you know how people perceive you at work?
Most of the time, you don't. Colleagues soften real feedback when their name is attached to it, formal reviews happen once a year at most, and asking directly gets you a polite non-answer. Bariz measures it directly instead: you describe your own work, then people who actually work with you anonymously describe it too — and the two are compared.
Why this is hard to find out normally
Three things get in the way. People edit what they say when they know you'll see their name on it, even when they don't mean to — the editing happens before the words leave their mouth, not as a conscious decision to withhold. Structured feedback — a performance review, a 360 process — usually happens once or twice a year at most, run by HR for HR's purposes, not yours, and rarely asks the specific question of whether your positioning actually lands. And asking a colleague directly, "how do you see my work?", almost always gets a kind, vague, unusable answer, because there's real social cost to saying anything else — nobody wants to be the one who told you your positioning isn't landing.
How Bariz answers it
You take a short self-assessment describing your field, specialism, the problem you solve, and who you serve. You then share an anonymous link with colleagues, clients, and peers, who answer the same questions about you — with no field in the database ever connecting their answer back to their identity. Every score is measured against its chance baseline, so agreeing with you by coincidence doesn't count as real signal.
What you actually get
A named diagnosis — one of eight specific positioning patterns — showing exactly where your self-description and the crowd's perception diverge, plus a ranked action plan to close the gap. Not a vague "areas for improvement" summary.
A CONCRETE EXAMPLE
What a positioning gap actually looks like
Take someone who introduces themselves by job title — "Senior Product Manager," "Marketing Director," "Civil Engineer" — because that's the honest, accurate answer to "what do you do?" Their self-assessment might name a specific specialism underneath that title. But when colleagues, clients, and peers describe the same person anonymously, their answers tend to cluster around the title itself, not the specialism, because the title is the loudest signal actually reaching them day to day. Bariz names this pattern Title, not position: recognized by a job title, not by a position in a market. The real cost shows up concretely — you get compared on price with everyone else who shares your title, since the market has no more specific category to sort you into. A self-assessment alone can't surface this, because the person describing themselves already knows the specialism underneath the title. Only the aggregate outside view, compared honestly against the self-view, shows that the title is what actually reached other people — not the specialism behind it.
COMMON QUESTIONS
Before you invite anyone to respond
Won't people just say nice things to be kind?
That's the specific failure mode Bariz is built to avoid. Named feedback carries real social cost to being fully honest — the same reason formal reviews and direct questions tend to come back polite and vague. Responses here are structurally anonymous: no field in the database ever connects a submitted answer back to who submitted it, not even at the aggregate-viewer level, so there's no name for a respondent to be protecting.
How many responses do I need before the results mean anything?
Five, minimum, before a diagnosis is generated. Fewer than that and a handful of outlier answers could swing the whole read — five is the point where the aggregate view starts reflecting an actual pattern rather than one person's mood that day. Nothing stops you from inviting more; the diagnosis simply reflects whichever responses have come in so far.
Isn't this basically a 360 review?
No — a 360 is usually run by HR, tied to a review cycle, and covers broad competencies like leadership and teamwork, often visible to a manager even in aggregate. Bariz runs on your own schedule, needs no company involvement, and measures one specific thing: whether people can accurately describe your professional positioning the same way you'd describe it yourself. See the full comparison.
What if the crowd's view of me is worse than I expected?
That's the point of measuring rather than guessing — a real gap you can now act on beats an assumed alignment you can't. Every score is shown next to its chance baseline, not on its own, so a low score against a low baseline reads very differently from a low score against a high one. The output isn't just a number, either — it's a named diagnosis plus a ranked action plan for closing the specific gap found.
Does this work outside tech and business roles?
Yes — the taxonomy underneath Bariz spans 24 professional domains and 304 specific specialisms, from software engineering and product management to civil engineering, healthcare, legal, and the creator economy. The mechanism — self-assessment versus anonymous aggregate, measured against chance — doesn't change by field; only the specific taxonomy terms do.
What actually happens once the diagnosis unlocks?
You get the named archetype itself, a plain-language explanation of what it means for how you're currently read in the market, and a ranked list of specific moves to close the gap — each one with ready-to-paste copy, not just an instruction to "work on your brand." The higher tier adds a 90-day re-test against the same crowd, so the next read shows whether the positioning actually moved or just felt like it did.