How to handle large UX portfolio projects and include the right level of detail

Sarah Doody [00:00:00]: Hey there. I’m Sarah Doody, host of the Career Strategy Podcast. Many professionals are seeking more impact, flexibility, growth, and let’s face it, getting paid what they’re worth. But how do you unlock this in your career? It starts with strategy. I’m taking you behind the scenes of what’s working for my career coaching clients. You’ll hear strategies and actionable, yet sometimes against the grain, advice for how you can be the CEO of your career and stop dreading Mondays. Ready to level up your career? Let’s get after it. Hey, friend.

Sarah Doody [00:00:39]: Today, I wanna talk about a question that comes up all the time. How do I handle large projects in my UX portfolio? I am asked this all of the time, and I thought it would make a great episode because here’s the thing that happens to many of you. My hunch is that you are trying to finish your portfolio, but but it’s taking much longer than you ever imagined because you’re trying to put these gigantic projects into it and include so many details. And as a result, potentially, you are seeing jobs that you would love to apply to, but you can’t because you are still working on your portfolio trying to get that big gigantic project that you worked on into the portfolio. So today, I wanna give you a bit of a hack for how to handle these large projects in your UX portfolio. So the most important thing I want you to take away from today’s episode is that it is perfectly fine to break up a very large project into multiple smaller projects for the purposes of your portfolio. So let’s get very granular here. A couple of years ago, someone in one of my career coaching programs had worked on a project at Dell, like Dell Computers that I think lasted 3 years.

Sarah Doody [00:02:11]: Now as you can imagine, that project had a lot of steps, phases, things that that person wanted to include in the portfolio. But they came to me and they Sarah, this project is starting to feel, a, really long, and, b, as I said earlier, they weren’t able to apply to jobs that they kept seeing because they were still trying to finish this project. And I said to them, well, look. Let’s think about this project, the 3 year project, in different kind of chapters or phases. So there was an element of product strategy, there was an element of creating an initial working prototype, There was an element of usability testing that prototype in person in multiple countries. Then there was the step of redoing the entire project, or product based on the findings of the research, and then a bunch of things happened after that. So I said to this person, let’s consider each of those phases or chapters as an individual project in the portfolio. Doing this also helps solve a problem that people earlier in their career have, which is many people kind of worry that, oh, I only have one project in my portfolio, is that enough? Well, by taking a larger project and breaking it up into chapters, you can all of a sudden have a portfolio with 3, 4 projects in it.

Sarah Doody [00:03:55]: So this is a great strategy for, you know, people earlier in their career and definitely people later in their career that may have worked on much larger projects that, in this case, went on for 3 plus years. And if you break the project up into smaller projects, that means you might be able to apply for that job because even though you haven’t added, you know, the 4th chapter of that project into your portfolio, you could still apply for a job. So that is what I want you to take away from today’s episode. And another thing I wanna kinda touch on here is this strategy of breaking up a big project into a bunch of smaller ones is also really great because when it comes to tailoring or customizing your portfolio for the job that you want, having a project broken up into smaller projects allows you to very easily remove a project that maybe doesn’t relate as strongly to other projects in your portfolio. And so if you applied for a job and you thought, oh, this third project in my portfolio, it’s Doody. But I think I’m gonna remove it because it kind of distracts from the other things I did that very very much relate to what they’re looking for in the job description. Also, having a big project broken up into smaller projects allows you to more easily rearrange projects in your portfolio. So let’s say you’re applying to, I don’t know, a research job and you worked on a big project that involved product strategy, maybe some interface design, research, maybe more interface design as you change the product based on the research.

Sarah Doody [00:05:54]: Well, in your portfolio, you might want to put the research projects earlier in the portfolio. Even though that might kinda make things seem out of order, what we want is we want to show the recruiters and hiring managers the evidence, the examples, the receipts. They just totally make it clear that you have the skills mentioned in the job description that they’re looking for. And it’s very clear because it’s right there in the first and the second and the third project in your portfolio versus maybe chronologically in the project they came towards the end and so you have them at the end of your portfolio. But that means we have to cross our fingers and hope they actually get to the end of your portfolio. If you have worked on large projects in your portfolio, consider this permission to break it up and create smaller projects so you can more easily tailor that portfolio when you do apply for a job. And I would argue, though I haven’t tested this with recruiters and hiring managers, I think by breaking them up into smaller projects makes it easier makes the usability of your portfolio a lot easier for recruiters and hiring managers because they’re not kind of digging through one giant project. They’re able to see especially if your portfolio has a table of contents, okay in this portfolio there’s 2 research projects, a product strategy project and a product management project.

Sarah Doody [00:07:35]: I don’t know. You get the idea. Alright. So that is all for Doody. Today. I hope if you are struggling to finish a project in your portfolio, maybe you’re going to be able to separate it out into smaller projects. So you can actually apply for those jobs that you’re seeing, but maybe not applying to because you’re still not finished with your portfolio. Alright.

Sarah Doody [00:08:01]: Hope this helps. I will see you in another episode. Thanks for listening to the Career Strategy Podcast. Make sure to follow me, Sarah Doody, on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn. If anything in today’s episode resonated with you, I’d love to hear about it. Tag me on social media or send me a DM. And lastly, if you found this episode helpful, I’d really appreciate it if you could share it with a friend or give us a quick rating on Spotify or review on Apple Podcasts. Catch you later.