Hello! I’m back again with an FAQ-style post. These are consolidating my thoughts and the questions people have asked me in one place.
TL;DR:
How does one demonstrate their potential? How do those hiring identify potential?
What is the perfect portfolio?
Why is there such a divide with designers?
What is the design job market like?
Let’s get into this:
How does one demonstrate their potential? How do those hiring identify potential?
We’re all figuring out our way in the world of AI, so a lot of design hiring needs to be based on potential because there are a LOT of designers who haven’t shipped AI-native products or are not able to use AI prototyping tools internally, so when hiring, we need to be aware of this.
Demonstrate the behaviours, not just the background: The qualities that companies want to see are natural curiosity (unprompted), agency, rigour, ability to build relationships with cross-functional peers, and comfort with ambiguity. All of these behaviours can surface through almost any body of work if you present it right. The domain is almost secondary. What interviewers are really asking is: does this person think the way our best designers think?
Live, in-progress work can outperform a polished portfolio: There’s something about an unfiltered process that reveals capability more honestly than a curated deck. Pulling up Figma files that are days/weeks old, walking through concepts that aren’t finished, and showing the thinking behind decisions that haven’t been validated yet. All of this can be more compelling than a polished case study that’s been prepped for a presentation. I am seeing these types of interviews a lot more now.
Being honest about your gaps is vital: Designers who acknowledge that a design could have been better thought through, or that a product didn’t have the impact they were expecting, come across as more credible. It shows self-awareness and a growth mindset, which companies value precisely because they’re hiring someone to operate in fast-paced, ambiguous environments. Sometimes, the best insight into how someone thinks comes from the question of “What would you have done differently?”
If you haven’t worked on AI products, point to technical products you’ve worked on elsewhere. If you haven’t worked at scale, show how you’ve collaborated in smaller environments and explain what you’d bring to a larger one. Interviewers are trying to de-risk a hire. If your direct experience doesn’t obviously de-risk, companies need to see where your potential can be harnessed.
USE THE PRODUCT: This matters. Candidates who’ve clearly done research, point out what they would improve, understand the competitive industry the company is in, and aren’t afraid to ask challenging questions signal proactiveness.
Side projects: Nad talks about this on his podcast with Ridd on Dive Club. If you can’t show commercial work of shipping AI products, if you can show you’re building experience on the side with new tooling, trying new things. Companies want to hire people with deep intrinsic drive, and this is one of the very best ways.
What is the perfect portfolio?
The perfect portfolio doesn’t exist. But the ones that work share something in common: they’re built for a specific reader, not a general audience. Here’s what that means in practice.
Treat it like a product. The designers who get this right approach their portfolio with the same attention to detail they bring to their day job. Small details matter in the structure, the narrative, the quality of what you choose to show. A portfolio that looks like an afterthought signals that your standards drop when the work is about you.
Relevance is the only metric that matters. A portfolio isn’t about showcasing everything you’ve done, it’s about showing hiring managers how closely you match what they need right now. That means understanding the role, the company, and the type of work they value before you decide what to include. When you design your portfolio around those priorities, the fit becomes obvious. When you don’t, you make the reader do the work — and most won’t.
Show your most recent work, not your most polished old work. The demand for designers who have worked on AI-driven products, or who prototype with AI tools, is high and growing. Reaching back three or four years for your best case study is a mistake if it means hiding what you can do right now. Companies want to see who you are today, not who you were at your last peak.
Lead with outcomes, not process. Start each case study with a concrete result before getting into the details. What changed? What shipped? What did it affect? Interviewers are time-poor and pattern-matching quickly. If they have to read to the end to understand why your work mattered, most won’t get there.
Show the work, don’t describe it. This is where a lot of portfolios fall down. Talking about interactions you designed without showing them. Presenting polished static screens without any sense of the thinking behind them. Walking through context for so long, there’s no time left for the actual design. The work is the argument. Everything else supports it. If the interaction is important, prototype it. If the process is interesting, show the Figma files — messy, in progress, honest. That kind of transparency is more impressive than a curated deck of final screens.
Visual craft is non-negotiable at IC level. Designers with a purely UX background, who lack strong visual evidence in their portfolios, consistently struggle at the portfolio review stage. This isn’t always fair, but it’s consistently true. If your strength is systems thinking or research, you need other ways to demonstrate that — but you also need to show you can make things look good. One without the other leaves gaps that are hard to close.
For ICs: three to five focused case studies, no more. Each should reflect the type of work you want to do next, not just the work you’ve done. Show your decision-making process, your niche expertise, and the results you delivered. Explain not just what you created but why it mattered to the business.
For leaders: the portfolio is about influence. Show your sharp eye for detail, the case studies you and your team have worked on where you’ve seen a clear improvement in design quality, and any metrics that back this up. For Head of Design/Directors, the expectation is less people management, but more impact on the product at all times. Talk through strong product/eng partnerships, taste and craft, etc.
Show AI fluency. This means more than mentioning tools. Show how AI is embedded into your day-to-day from prototypes you’ve built in Cursor or Claude or any of the tools and the ways you’ve used it to move faster or get closer to owning the frontend.
Make it interactive where it counts. Clickable prototypes, Figma links, and video walkthroughs aren’t nice-to-haves. They’re the difference between telling someone how something works and showing them. Given that interaction design is increasingly central to what companies are hiring for, a portfolio of static images is a missed opportunity. People want to see work, not be told about it.
Why is there such a divide among designers in 2026?
What do I mean by this:
The recent Figma report found designers almost evenly split on their feelings about the industry.
The gap between those designers isn’t primarily about years of experience or raw talent. It’s about whether the way you work today reflects how the best product teams actually operate right now.
Designers I see who do well in interviews is: They show work in progress live prototypes built in any number of tools, they drive work forward without waiting for direction, they think in systems rather than screens, with a genuine understanding of the technical depth underlying what they’re designing for And when pushed on rationale, they have real answers not generic frameworks dressed up as experience and not hypothetical project walkthroughs.
The designers who I see struggle to get interviews have a gap between what they say and what they can show. Candidates who describe interactions they designed but never demonstrate them. Portfolios optimised for polished presentations with reams of “process”, for example, the double diamond. Designers whose strategic thinking, when probed, turns out to have been done largely by a PM and have been shielded for years without realising it.
AI fluency is the sharpest dividing line. Designers I speak to who are most excited are the ones who’ve completely changed how they work, operate, and think about design. They’re building AI prototypes, they are owning more of the frontend, etc. They don’t feel threatened by AI, they see it a tool to enhance their work. They’re using AI to close the gap between idea and validation, to collaborate more tightly with engineering, to move faster without sacrificing judgment. Here is a post I shared last year on “The future of Product Design”, which may be helpful.
Most designers are more shielded than they realise. One of the most consistent observations across the hiring processes I’ve been involved in is that the market is full of talented designers who have been operating in a well-defined lane, for example, PMs define the problem, researchers hand over findings, and engineers build it. Designers execute within clear constraints. As product/eng/design roles merge closely together, they are not looking for someone to stay in their lane.
The design exercise reveals a lot of gaps during the interview process. It’s the one stage where live thinking matters most. The candidates who struggle commit to a direction without exploring alternatives, tweak rather than rethink, and produce work that doesn’t match the thoughtfulness of their talk about design. There is often a gap between articulation and execution. And again, companies care about output, output, output!
What is the design job market like?
Lots of demand for player-coach leaders. One pattern I’ve seen while working on leadership roles over the last year is that companies don’t want leaders close to the work. They want leaders who can inspire the team through the work, have a product impact and be hands-on. People management is just part of the role, not the main role.
The market is similar to 2021 when the hiring was off the charts, but whilst the demand for designers is high, I feel companies will wait to find the right person, unlike 2021.
People from a very focused UX background, without a demonstration of well-crafted visual products in their portfolio, will and do struggle to get through the portfolio review of IC roles. You need to lean on other areas to stand out. Not saying this is right, but it's just what I am observing
It’s insanely tough for junior designers. The majority of companies I speak to need senior talent because what they are doing is new, and they feel a senior is best suited to help them.
I have seen a nice uptick in requirements for fractional designers and leaders recently to help advise start-ups, plug a leadership gap and offer executional design support. I’m seeing a lot of need for very strong, visually focused designers to support design teams with capacity or fill a leadership gap for a few months (2-3 days per week) whilst the company hires a new permanent design leader. Just a reminder, I believe fractional roles come from your network 99% of the time.
Many companies are figuring out how to hire designers effectively in 2026. A real issue for design teams when hiring is that some design teams are so far ahead, prototyping with newer AI tools and, in general, ways of working, that it’s difficult to find designers who have done this and meet every requirement. This is why hiring more interns and early-stage designers would be great, as they are often far ahead with AI understanding and the newer ways of working in design, as it’s all they’ve known.
A lot of executive searches are being done off the market. As always.
Here is the most recent image from TrueUp on design jobs per level.
Design hiring in 2026 is wild. The designers who are thriving aren't necessarily the most experienced; they're the ones who are curious, spend hours honing their craft and refuse to let seniority become a substitute for staying relevant. The ones who are struggling aren't lacking talent; they're operating on the playbook of yesteryear.
P.S. A quick update on the Verified Insider, you can expect to see future posts (1-2 months) on operating as a Staff, Principal, Director and VP of Design with collaborations from people doing incredible work at this level, as well as posts on the future of product and brand design with two people I admire greatly at what they do. The goal remains to give you clarity on the industry.
P.S.S. I answered these questions by sharing my articles, LinkedIn posts and real feedback I’ve seen given on candidates with Claude and added my tweaks. These are my thoughts with tweaks.