Creative Ref

Share context up front about who you are, the organization you work for, and what kinds of problems you like to solve. A portfolio presentation should feel like telling a story: introduce the characters (you), the environment (the organization, problem space, your team), and the conflict (the problems you worked on).

Some things to mention about yourself up front: Who you are, where you're from...the basics What kinds of problems you’ve worked on in the past (how did you get here?) Notable past accomplishments Side projects you’ve shipped

Answer questions like: What was wrong with the onboarding? How did you know? What did the data or research suggest that helped the organization realize this was a problem? Why did the company choose to work on this particular problem before any other problems? What people or systems decided how much time and energy to devote to solving this problem? How did the team agree upon a way to know when they had solved the problem, qualitatively or quantitatively?

Define your constraints early: we had one engineer and two weeks, we didn’t have good data, our design system didn’t have the right components, we were building for a new platform, we were fighting confusing regulations…

If it’s relevant, explain how your company builds products as a meta-constraint: Does the team gravitate towards scrappy MVPs and shipping iteratively? Or does the team build up towards big releases on a strict cadence? Does your organization have a research team? Or are designers expected to run research themselves? Do you have a design system? Or did you have to create bespoke components as you go?

Interviewers want to know: How do you think critically about risks, dependencies, side effects, or externalities? What do you do to overcome constraints that customers won't care about (e.g. bureaucracy)? How do you navigate technological and organizational headwinds?

You’ll raise eyebrows and keep interviewers engaged if you can teach them anything during your presentation. What surprised you while working on a project? What ideas did you try that turned out to be incorrect? Or even better: what worked better than you could have ever imagined? Did you learn something about your industry, your business, psychology, pricing models, or design systems? Did your work affect other key metrics within the organization? Did you discover non-obvious externalities in your problem space? Did you execute a creative go-to-market strategy?

Bring interviewers along for the ride, explaining how you explored potential solutions to the problem and how you were able to validate or reject those solutions. It’s important to see that you are able to explore wide and fast, and not get tunnel vision on the first idea that hits your canvas.