Episode 108
The goal of a UX portfolio isn’t to sell the product you worked on, it’s about selling YOU
11 min listen
Episode 104
11 min listen

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Episode Summary
Many UX candidates miss the goal of a UX portfolio. UX portfolios don’t lead to job interviews or job offers because the case studies read as though they’re selling a product to investors or internal stakeholders. This episode reveals why UX case studies that sound like they’re selling the product in an investor or stakeholder meeting is a mistake. Providing too much detail in a UX case study about the product you worked can overwhelm UX recruiters and hiring managers with too much detail. Instead, the focus of your UX portfolio and case studies should be on demonstrating your unique problem-solving skills and thought process.
Learn the art of writing effective UX case studies that highlight YOU – your decisions, iterations, and how you navigated challenges and not just the final product. Discover why reflecting on your experiences and showcasing how you collaborate with others can help your UX case study and portfolio not sound like those of every other candidate.
Through practical tips and real-world examples, this episode will help you ensure UX portfolio communicates a compelling narrative that sells you as the ideal candidate. Whether you’re updating your UX portfolio or gearing up for interviews, this episode provides strategies to help you stand out in the competitive UX job market.
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Discussion Questions About The Episode
- How do you currently structure the case studies in your portfolio, and how might you reframe them to better highlight your thought process and decision-making abilities?
- Reflect on a past project where you had to iterate several times before reaching a final solution. What were the key learnings from those iterations, and how did they improve your design or approach?
- Consider a time when you faced significant trade-offs, such as budget constraints or tight deadlines, in your work. How did you navigate those challenges, and what strategies did you implement to achieve a successful outcome?
- Think about your collaboration experiences with other teams or departments. How do you ensure effective communication and teamwork, and what examples can you provide of successful cross-functional collaboration?
- What lessons have you learned from previous projects that you can carry forward to future work? How can these experiences inform your growth as a UX professional and enhance your portfolio?
Episode Notes & Links
Episode Transcript
Sarah Doody [00:00:00]: Your portfolio should not be focused on selling the product that you worked on like you’re going on shark tank and trying to get money. Your portfolio is meant to sell you, the product of you. It’s not a showcase of what you made. It’s a showcase of how you think. 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.
Sarah Doody [00:00:39]: 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. Alright. Today I have a bit of a hot take. So I have reviewed thousands of UX portfolios since 2017 and here is one of the biggest mistakes I see. Your portfolio feels like it’s selling the product you worked on, but in reality your portfolio should be selling you, the product of you. So too many portfolios often focus on end features and shiny design, and they miss the mark by not highlighting how you arrived at that solution.
Sarah Doody [00:01:36]: They don’t highlight the process and decisions that led to that final thing. Now why is this? Why do so many portfolios feel like they’re selling the product you worked on and not you the candidate? I think it is because couple of things. Number 1, I think many people try and reuse presentations and slides that maybe they used for team meetings, for stakeholders, etcetera, and just literally cut and paste them for their portfolio. Now the problem with that is the user of a presentation to your colleagues or internal stakeholders is different than the user of your portfolio, right? The user of your portfolio is recruiters and hiring managers. And the level of detail and what they want to see in your portfolio is different from some internal stakeholder, and you’re trying to communicate to them the details of a new feature or, you know, portfolios sometimes also feel like investor pitch decks, and it’s kinda showing all the beautiful end designs and things, but it’s not telling us how did you arrive at that solution or that end thing. And therein is exactly what recruiters and hiring managers want to see. They are the real users of your portfolio, and that’s why even though it can be super tempting to try and reuse existing materials and decks and presentation slides for meetings you had with your boss or coworkers, etcetera, and repurpose them for your portfolio, it ends up falling short because it doesn’t answer the questions that recruiters and hiring managers have when they are evaluating you as a candidate. So let’s quickly talk about some of the things that recruiters and hiring managers want to see in your portfolio and hear in interviews.
Sarah Doody [00:03:50]: So if you’re finished with your portfolio and you’re preparing for interviews, just translate these tips to the interviews. Alright. Number 1. How did you arrive at a decision or a solution? They don’t just want to know what you did, they want to know why you did it. So you did a survey, you had to do research, and you decided to do a survey. Well great, they don’t just want to hear you did a survey, they want to hear the decisions around, well why did you even decide to do research in the first place? What led to this need to do research? What did you hope to learn? Why did you decide a survey would be the best research method versus other research methods, etcetera? So that’s what I mean when I say you have to explain how you arrived at decisions or solutions. Alright, number 2, how you iterated or how decisions or designs evolved in the process. A lot of people think that if your portfolio provides an example of where you created something, created a user flow, created a design, let’s say, and then you had to go back and iterate it because it wasn’t working, a lot of people think, oh, I can’t show that because people will think I’m a bad designer and I’m a total failure and incompetent.
Sarah Doody [00:05:20]: No. That is, like, real life. We get things wrong all the time. Right? It is core to what we do. It is part of our process. We iterate. Right? So if you can show examples of where, okay, I started here and it created this based on, you know, whatever information you had. And then maybe you did some research and you realize, no one can make it through that checkout or they can’t book that free trial or whatever.
Sarah Doody [00:05:50]: And you had to go back and do version 2 and 3 and 4, whatever it was. Hiring managers want to see that evolution. They want to see that iteration, and it will not make you look like a bad designer or an incompetent designer or something like that. It’s helping them see inside your thought process and how you arrived at these solutions you arrived at. Alright. Another thing you would think about is are there opportunities to show how you made trade offs in whatever you were doing? Maybe you had to make trade offs because of budget or time or capacity of the team. If you encountered those scenarios, talk about those when you are crafting your case study. Those trade offs and designing for and through those trade offs, that’s really important because it helps communicate, number 1, your experience dealing with situations like that.
Sarah Doody [00:07:00]: But also, I think it communicates a little bit more, maturity and experience as as a designer. Because, sure, many people can just open up software and make things, but if you’re all of a sudden told, oh, now you only have 2 weeks to do this instead of 2 months, or oh, you actually can’t do research now because the timeline and budget doesn’t allow for it anymore. Okay. What do you do? Tell us what you did and why you did it and how you tackled that. That is interesting, and that is an example of how you could stand out to recruiters and hiring managers by including scenarios like that in your portfolio. How you navigated any challenges that came up. So this could be things like dealing with, you know, difficult, let’s say, stakeholders, difficult team members, maybe half the team was laid off in the middle of the project. Who knows? But many projects don’t go as planned, and how you navigated those problems is an important part of the narrative of your case studies.
Sarah Doody [00:08:11]: Another thing to think about is how did you collaborate with your peers or with other departments and teams? This again helps communicate these soft skills, as they’re often referred to, that people are looking for when hiring. Right? So if you can, where possible, mention how you collaborated with other teams or departments, what you collaborated on, etcetera. Another thing you can think about talking about is what you learned and how it informs your future work. So not every case study can end with, and this project made the company $5,000,000. Right? It’s that’s not the real world. That’s not how jobs work. Right? Not every project ends with a result like that. However, in your case study it can be really really valuable to have just a moment where you reflect on the project and talk about are there any big takeaways, lessons learned, etc, that you could bring to future projects.
Sarah Doody [00:09:20]: Very very important. Again, communicates maturity as a professional, communicates a commitment to growth, and communicates just a willingness to be better. So great example of something else you can include in your portfolio. So to recap here, your portfolio should not be focused on selling the product that you worked on like you’re going on shark tank and trying to get money. Your portfolio is meant to sell you, the product of you. It’s not a showcase of what you made. It’s a showcase of how you think. So I hope this reframe helps you think about the style and tone of the case studies in your portfolio.
Sarah Doody [00:10:15]: And if you want help with your portfolio, we have a lot of resources on that. We will link to a couple of articles and podcast episodes in the show notes. And of course, we also have our 3 month career strategy lab program. It is a UX career coaching program for mid and senior UX and product people. We help you navigate the job search without applying to hundreds of jobs and help you position yourself to get hired or promoted with a 5 figure salary increase. So if you wanna learn more about that, you can go to careerstrategylab.com/apply to learn more. Or if you have questions, just send me a DM on LinkedIn. And that is all for today.
Sarah Doody [00:11:05]: I will talk to you in the next 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.