Your portfolio is a public representation of your skills and experience as a designer. It's your visual elevator pitch; therefore, it's critical that it catches the attention of recruiters and hiring managers. Out of all the interview prep you do for product design interviews, prioritize crafting your portfolio. A strong portfolio will increase your chances of catching the eye of a hiring manager and help you answer interview questions on your design philosophy and process through your chosen projects.

You can also count on presenting your portfolio in your interview. In addition to being able to represent the value you created as a designer, you’ll be expected to articulate and defend your design decisions. You may walk through it informally during the hiring manager screen, prepare a formal presentation for your onsite, or both - so take your time. Craft a portfolio that speaks to who you are and how you work as a designer.

Over the next few lessons, we'll cover:

• How to format a winning portfolio.
• How to get started if you don't already have one.
• What to do if you don't yet have a wealth of projects.
• How to answer questions on your design process and demonstrate product thinking using your portfolio.
• How to present your portfolio with confidence.

But first, we should talk about the two different types of portfolios: your online portfolio, and your in-person portfolio. Each has it's own format, audience, and goal.

What to expect

Even though there are two different types of portfolios, the content within both can mostly be the same. Think of preparing these portfolios as a single representation of your product thinking, visual craft, and interaction design catered towards two different audiences.

Online Portfolios

Your online portfolio is how most people will first come across your designs. Having your work online gives you a personalized space for you to direct people to your best work.

Online portfolios often come in the form of a custom or templated website. Popular templated sites include Wordpress, Dribbble, Behance, Coroflot, Adobe Portfolios and more. It should include several case studies (typically 3-5) about work you've done and should make sense without any too much explanation. If building a website is something you can’t do for one reason or another, the main takeaway is to be able to share your work digitally (i.e. a slide deck or PDF)

The audience of your online portfolio is often recruiters and hiring managers. Your portfolio, like the projects contained within it, should cater to that audience. Often recruiters are skimming multiple portfolios per day so you want to be able to quickly convey a few key skills: product thinking, visual craft, and interaction design.

In the end, the goal of the online portfolio is to give the recruiter enough confidence in your skills to reach out to you for an initial phone screen.

In-Person Portfolios

If your online portfolio is successful in attracting the attention of recruiters, then it's likely you’ll be asked to present your portfolio in front of the hiring committee. This will give you the chance to talk through your portfolio in more detail in select case studies. Because this review is in person and requires a voice-over, the format of choice is often a Keynote or Powerpoint presentation.

The hiring committee you’ll be presenting to often includes product designers, the hiring manager, and other stakeholders you would work with on their team (i.e. product managers or engineers). This group wants to get a sense of your product thinking and visual design and interaction design craft. But they also want to know if you are a proactive and driven member of a team. And they want to get a sense for who you are as a person.

Most in-person portfolio reviews will be 45 minutes to 1 hour, which gives you time to go through a short introduction, 2–3 case studies, and answer questions the hiring committee may have after your presentation.

How to prepare

Just like any design project kickoff, it’ll be important to do some ‘pre-work’ before diving into portfolio creation. A good kickoff has the problems you’re trying to solve for clearly outlined as well as requirements on what a successful solution looks like. Applying this to your portfolio, you’ll want to reflect on what strengths you want to highlight.

When considering how you want to highlight your strengths, ask yourself, “what are 3–5 projects that really exemplify my strengths?” All of these case studies should show that you are a well-rounded designer with strong product thinking and visual and interaction design craft, which may mean different case studies emphasize different strengths or all case studies are well rounded.

Filling in the blanks

Especially for those earlier designers, finding even 3 projects that can be used as portfolio case studies may be a challenge. However, in order for a recruiter to be able to make a proper assessment they need to see your work.

What are some options that you can pursue?

• Shift your perspective → If a project isn’t as strong for whatever reason, it still may be an opportunity to showcase your skills as a designer. For example, a project that wasn’t delivered successfully or reached desired metrics can still emphasize your ability to make user-centered decisions or participate in overall product strategy.
• Reframe non-design work → Especially if you’re coming from a non-traditional background, is there anything you’ve worked on that can highlight transferable skills to the design field? That could like examples of success project management or cross-functional collaboration.
• Use a personal project → If you haven’t worked on any design projects, you can always do your own. A common example is an app redesign, but you can really use this as an opportunity to go through your own design process to solve a problem you’re passionate about.

With some introspection on the type of designer you want to present yourself as & strategies on what work to use to convey that, you’ll be setup to design your portfolios.