Five Different Portfolios, Five Similar Opportunities

When I turned on paid subscriptions for Formative, I offered the first five paid subscribers a free portfolio critique, tied specifically to the kind of role each of them was actually looking for.

What I expected was five separate conversations. But quickly I saw there were more commonalities than differences, even with designers ranging in career stage and goals.

One wants to move toward visual design and creative direction. One is an AI-first builder with a stack of self-started projects. One is going after design leadership. One is a commerce and payments specialist targeting Staff product roles. Different levels, different goals, different bodies of work.

And almost every critique I wrote ended up circling the same five opportunities.

If you are sitting on a portfolio right now and not getting the calls you think you should be getting, there is a chance at least one of these is the reason.

This was the most common one, and it showed up in nearly every review.

“A Senior Product Designer driving impact through innovation.” “Innovative, impactful designer.” These intros are invisible. They could sit on top of any senior portfolio on the internet and nobody would notice.

The top two scrolls of your site (assume mobile-first!) are the most valuable real estate you have, and most designers spend them describing the category they belong to instead of the specific thing they are great at. Hiring managers do not skim to find out that you are a senior designer who cares about impact. They assume that. They skim to find out what makes you worth a call.

Instead of “innovative designer who drives impact,” say what you actually mean. “I have deep experience in commerce and retail” or “I transformed the world’s best checkout into the world’s first agentic checkout.” Specific is memorable and relevant. Generic is forgettable, even when the work behind it is solid.

Closely related, and equally common - a lack of communicating what you want makes it hard for recruiters to know if you’re a fit.

Are you looking for an IC role or a manager role, or maybe player/coach with a small team? Pure software, or is hardware a big focus for you? A broad product role or a narrow specialist one? On a lot of these portfolios, I genuinely could not tell. And if I cannot tell, a recruiter giving you eight seconds definitely cannot.

Vagueness feels safe. It feels like you are keeping your options open. In practice it does the opposite. A portfolio that could be for five different jobs does not read as flexible to a hiring manager. It reads as unfocused at best, and junior at worst (unless you’re actually junior - in which case personal projects that show your craft and desired focus areas should lead).

Picking a direction is scary because it means saying no to the other directions. But the designer who clearly wants one specific thing beats the designer who might want anything.

One caveat. Being niche can be a tradeoff. If your whole portfolio screams “hardware plus software futurist,” the Meta XR hiring manager will love it and almost everyone else will pass. That can be exactly right if it is what you want. Just make the choice on purpose instead of by accident.

One last thing - as someone who also has covered a lot of interests and industries over the years, I am living testament to the idea that who you are and want you want isn’t a forever thing. You can change and evolve over time and what you want in 5 years may change. But having a strong POV on who you are and what you want today gives you a better frame of reference for someone to evaluate your fit compared to other applicants.

Several of these portfolios had a lot of work on them. Years of it. Every project the designer was ever proud of, in a sea of gorgeous thumbnails.

I know where this is coming from. It feels generous (“I want to show variety in the problems I’ve solved”), and it feels like proof (“I’ve suceeded in many different environments”). But the average hiring manager is not going to read all your case studies. You get one, maybe two if they still have doubts. They are going to click on one of your first case studies - trying to guess at which is more relevant to the job description, form an opinion, and move on. If they click the wrong one, the one that does not match the job they are hiring for, they bounce. And you never find out it happened.

One subscriber, a designer who runs his own venture studio, put it well after our initial feedback session. He told me his portfolio used to say “here is a menu of things I did,” and since our discussions, he has rebuilt it to be far more curated.

There are two ways to approach this. One, cut the case studies that no longer serve the roles you want, even the ones you are attached to. Or, if you genuinely cannot bear to cut them (make sure you have a reason and you’re not just sentimental), add taxonomy and filters so a hiring manager can find what is relevant to them, things like Web and Mobile, Hardware, AI. And show your best and most recent work first. I would not lead with anything older than five or six years. Put the rest in an archive for the curious if you feel like they still serve a purpose.

A pattern inside the actual case studies: lots of zoomed-out process shots, messy artboards, wireframes, and polished final stills. Not a lot of anything moving.

Here is the problem. A few static screens and a clean before-and-after can look identical whether you redesigned a product or just reskinned it. The viewer cannot tell the difference, so they assume the less impressive one. The craft that actually separates senior designers - the journeys, the motion, the in-between moments - differentiate designers who “make mocks” and designers who have solved end-to-end problems and exhibit systems thinking.

One short prototype video of a user actually doing a critical job seamlessly and elegantly inside your product is worth more than three scrolls of process imagery and long-form writing. It shows your taste, your craft, and your ability to solve a real journey, ideally a complex one with ease and simplicity.

Also important - did the work ship? Conceptual work is fine to include, but if every case study is a beautiful idea that never launched, that is a pattern a hiring manager will notice and all (except for agencies) will likely pass. Show the launch, metrics and/or user feedback. Show any signal at all that this was a real product that solved real problems for actual people.

Two small notes for the current moment. Purple gradients everywhere are starting to read as “AI did most of my UI,” so put enough of your own taste into the work that it clearly belongs to you. And a lot of wireframing in your process can quietly date you, since many teams now skip straight to rapid prototyping. Neither is a dealbreaker. Both are worth knowing, depending on where you are applying.

Remember, you have two portfolios. Your public facing one is your introduction. Your panel interview is fair game for more deep dives on process, while your public portfolio is meant for a quick scan of your impact, experiences, capabilities and strengths.

Some designers try to prove they are senior by stating it on their portfolio and on their LinkedIn/CV. The title, the team size, the years. But title is weak evidence of seniority. The strongest evidence is the blast radius of your work. What did you actually change? What landed? What did the org do differently because you were there? What would happen if you weren’t?

Show seniority through scope and outcomes, not labels. If you created patents, make that big and bold, not tiny text at the bottom of a page. If you moved a real metric, say the number.

Be a partner and owner, not someone in a support role. “Helped guide research” sounds vague. “Sole designer responsible for UX and visual design, plus hands-on user research where we lacked UXR staffing” sounds like someone multitalented, a self-learner and someone who takes initiative. Startups would be lucky to have you.

Here is the part that surprised me, doing five of these back to back.

Almost none of the problems were craft problems. The work, in every single case, was good - often excellent. The issues were clarity problems. Positioning, focus, framing, curation, proof. These designers were not failing to be good. They were failing to get their “good” across.

That is a great place to be in and totally fixable. Craft takes years to build. Clarity you can fix this week. You probably do not need more work. You need a sharper decision about who you are, a more ruthless cut of what you show, and more engaging content that shows elegant end-to-end work that showcases your craft and skill quickly.

I mentioned one of these subscribers earlier, the designer who rebuilt his portfolio from a menu into a point of view. It is worth finishing his story, because it is the closest thing I have to proof that any of this actually works.

He is very senior. Patents, a deep range of work across industries, an obvious amount of taste. His problem was never craft. It was that everything he had ever shipped sat on the page with equal weight, under a headline that quietly boxed him into one narrow shape of role.

After his critique he did the hard part. He cut. He reframed. He made a real decision about the kind of design leadership role he wanted, and rebuilt the site around that one decision instead of around his entire career. He is now in active interview processes for leadership roles at companies most people in this industry would recognize on sight. His words, not mine: “Every bit helps, and I credit you and your article for helping me hone in.”

I want to be honest about what that does and does not mean. I did not get him those interviews. His work did. What the critique did was smaller and more boring than that. It helped him decide. It pointed at the parts that were already great and said lead with these and cut the rest.

So if there is one thing to take from all this - it’s this: top trying to look like a great designer. One good case study already does that well. Decide which great designer you are, and make it obvious.