Do design leaders need portfolios?
Quick answer: it helps.
Everyone should have a “portfolio” of some sort. It could be a presentation, a deck, a website or a PDF.
“Portfolios” for design leaders is different to IC, your portfolio should be designed for non-design leaders to understand the value you can bring to the organisation in the top design role.
A design leadership portfolio will look different at different levels:
Manager - Team leadership and ensuring high craft in the team.
Director - Scaling design and cross-functional alignments of peers
VP/SVP - Your influence at executive level
CDO - How you’ve helped ensure design is a competitive advantage for long-term company strategies.
Key things to remember regardless of level, your portfolio should:
Be visually appealing
A lot of hiring managers for design leadership roles are not designers, they think in visuals, business outcomes, and whether person can help us solve a business problem. Make it look nice. Focus on visuals because the majority of us think visually. For example, we process images thousands of times faster than text.
Tell the story (yes, I know you’ve heard it a 100000 times)
People want to see what your outcomes and to see live work or the impact your work had on the business. I know as a recruiter I do not read masses of text on portfolios, I want to see live work, some data and options to see more understanding of the process later. I can’t see many busy hiring managers taking the time to read every case study in detail.
Things to think about when designing a leadership deck/portfolio:
Your team and how you’ve improved the quality of the work
Show the quality of their work, who they are and impact made
How you’ve bought together the right people and helped foster and environment to execute high quality work.
Talk about your approach to craft and how you’ve helped companies ensure they have the right culture, process, investment, and shared understanding to ensure great work.
Mention any awards you’ve won. Always nice to see!
Scenarios and case studies
Talking about what stage of companies you have joined and the mandate i.e was the company in a state of cost-cutting, innovation or optimisation?
What products or services have you been part of that exceeded expectations
Where have you identified gaps for innovation and achieved successful outcome? Are you someone who can run with something ambiguous and deliver? When/where have you done this?
3. Hiring and retaining talent
Budgets you’ve had to hire.
Scenarios when you’ve had to be creative to hire the very top talent
Approach to attracting quality designers and leaders.
How you’ve designed career frameworks and integrated them to ensure you have motivated designers with clear goals.
Experience with budgets of 0-100m, dealing with companies questioning the value you bring to an organisation?
Business impact of your work
Breaking down your experience in integrating design across an organisation linking it to business goals and driving successful outcomes.
How/when have you got design on the map from a business POV, can you break this down?
How involved are you in strategic business decisions alongside the exec co
Approach to leadership
How you shape and advocate for a strong design culture
How do you define the standard for design?
What kind of leader you are. Are you someone who likes to be involved in the C-Suite, or are you someone who prefers to focus on the team and get in the weeds?
How effective you are with working with wider board members (could you get testimonials?)
What makes you effective as a design executive?
How/when have you got design on the map from a business POV, can you break this down?
(Depending on seniority) How you’ve helped elevate design in an organisation to making it industry-standard and transformed a business from top to bottom.
Examples of your speaking engagements, thought leadership and industry impact.
Until next time!
p.s Here is an example leadership portfolio I rate highly.
That case study example is brilliant. I really struggle with case studies for leadership. I always feel it’s the team that ultimately has done the work I’ve just pointed them in a direction. I don’t know how to articulate that or what I do. Great advice here. Thanks for sharing. I really needed this.
Incredible example from Mitchell! Thanks for sharing it Tom!