To Portfolio Or Not To Portfolio

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This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series. 

Most product and design job requirements ask for a portfolio. What do you do if you don’t have one?

I’m not a big fan of public portfolios. They lead to poor behavior. The creator takes too much credit for work that was likely done by a team. Work that often belongs to an employer or client is publicly on display.

Good designers often ask for permission, but even with it, it puts both parties in an awkward spot. Nobody wants to showcase their messy design process. And yet, that’s exactly what future employers want to see.

What’s a product professional to do?

I recommend three strategies:

1) Reference public material about the products you worked on. For example, at my last company, I managed inCircle and inCircle Jobs. inCirlce is a white-label social networking platform adopted by over 150 university alumni associations to engage their alumni. Unless you are a member of one of these private communities, it’s not publicly accessible. But I can still show this work to potential employers by referencing a screencast we used in our marketing materials.

inCircle Jobs was a social job board, helping job seekers find jobs through their friends. It doesn’t exist anymore. It was shut down by the acquiring company. But fortunately, we created a video walkthrough for prospective users that is still available on YouTube.

In both cases, I’m referencing  public materials so I don’t need to worry about over-sharing proprietary information.

2) Explain your role relative to others. I didn’t create these products by myself. I worked on a team. A hiring manager is going to want to know what I did and what others did. I inherited inCircle as a mature product. I was responsible for a number of redesigns, several new features, and a broad repositioning. inCircle Jobs was a product that I was responsible for from concept through launch. For both products, I worked with a great visual and interaction designer and a great engineering team.

3) Show off design process artifacts during the interview. The first two strategies should be enough to give a hiring manager an idea of the quality of products you have worked on. If you get invited to an interview, that’s where you want to show what happens behind the scenes. For both of these products, I could show user stories, wireframes, how we measured success, usability test results, how we collected and tracked feedback, or whatever else was of interest to the hiring manager.

This type of material shouldn’t be in the public realm. I cringe when I see it in people’s portfolios. It’s important to have it ready to show on an as-needed basis. But each company has it’s own methods for getting to great products and most will consider this proprietary. Respect that. And of course, make sure you have permission to share this type of work even in a one-on-one scenario.

Everyone has work they can showcase. Even if you’ve never worked in a product role before, showcase your side projects. The goal of a portfolio is to show the hiring manager that you can do quality work that is inline with what they need you to do. That doesn’t have to mean sharing proprietary information. Get creative and tell a great story.

Do you have any portfolio strategies to share? Please add them in the comments below.

This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series.