Navigating the Portfolio Presentation, Part 1: How To Prepare
Prepare for your portfolio presentation with these guiding principles.
It’s the part of the product design interview loop that you might dread. Maybe just imagining it makes you sweat. Even if you’re comfortable with public speaking, the thought of walking into a room full of strangers who will be evaluating you and your portfolio for the next hour might make you at least a bit nervous.
The good news, as I like to think of it, is that the portfolio presentation is the step of the interview process where you have the advantage, as a candidate, to put your best foot forward. You get 45 minutes of uninterrupted time and space to showcase your strengths and skills as a designer, and you can be as creative as you’d like. All together, you can make a compelling case for how your experience naturally aligns with the role — and, therefore, why you’re a great fit for what the role needs.
Despite how intimidating and time-intensive the portfolio presentation can be, there are steps you can take to make the process easier while making your overall presentation more effective. It requires planning, preparation, and practice — but in this article, I’ll be unpacking an approach that has worked well for me and the candidates I’ve advised through the process. 👇
What you need to know about the portfolio presentation
Because the portfolio presentation is such a dense interview step, I’ll be breaking it down into a few separate articles. This first one will be focused on establishing some basic (but important) information about the portfolio presentation:
What it is and who will be there
What your audience is looking for
How to prepare for the process of creating your presentation
With that in mind, let’s get into it!
What is the portfolio presentation?
Put simply, the portfolio presentation is the stage of the product design interview process where you’ll give a 45-60 minute presentation — covering your background, experience, and a few specific projects — to a panel of interviewers, followed by Q&A. The presentation usually happens toward the middle to end of the interview loop, either before or in tandem with your final 1-1 interviews.
At a high level, you’ll usually want to cover the following points in your portfolio presentation:
A brief introduction of yourself
An overview of your experience and current company/role
A deep-dive into one or two of your best, most relevant projects
Closing remarks
While I won’t focus on the granularities of these points in this article, there’s plenty of resources online about what format you might want to follow for these points — I personally followed Femke’s portfolio presentation video. In a later article, I’ll get into more details on this and my own recommended format.
Who will be at the portfolio presentation?
The most integral part of giving a successful presentation is knowing your audience — understanding their interests, needs, and goals, and tailoring your content and delivery to them. As Nancy Duarte puts it in HBR’s Guide to Persuasive Presentations:
“When you walk into a room as a presenter, it’s easy to feel as if you’re in a position of power: You’re up front, perhaps even elevated on a stage, and people came to hear you speak. In reality, though, you’re not the star of the show. The audience is.
Why? The people you’re addressing will determine whether your idea spreads or dies, simply by embracing or rejecting it. You need them more than they need you. Since they have that control, it’s crucial to be humble in your approach. Use their desires and goals as a filter for everything you present.”
Based on the presentations I’ve given and the ones I’ve advised for candidates, you can usually expect the following people to attend as panelists:
Product designers
Senior product designers
Design managers
Design leadership, like a Head of Design or Director of Product Design
Cross-functional peers, like engineers or product managers
If you’re interviewing at a company with a more established design organization, your panel will likely consist of the first four groups — designers and design leaders. But regardless, you can expect the audience to be people who are related to, and frequently collaborate with, the team and role you’re interviewing for.
When you’re early in your career, it can be intimidating to present to an audience like this. Especially if your audience is more senior, it adds even more pressure on you to make your presentation informative and relevant to them. But, just keep in mind what your audience is looking for:
How you identify, communicate, prioritize, and solve problems. Good product design doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it requires the collaboration of many disciplines and roles. Your panel will be people who are experts at that science — for example, senior designers or design leaders who are more tenured in their careers. They’ll want to see your methodology around identifying problems (whether usability-related, technical, or product-oriented, for example) and how you move from that problem into an intelligent, product design solution, from initial concept through to execution.
How you collaborate with others. Product design looks different depending on the organization and team. For example, you might have had the opportunity to work with a UX researcher on a project, or maybe you’ve had to do all the research yourself. Maybe you worked closely with your product manager, or maybe you had to make do until they hired someone for that role. Your audience will want to clearly understand who’s involved in your projects and how you work with those various people/roles.
How you make design decisions based on context. This could include data, research, scope, business needs, product direction, engineering or technical considerations, and more. Smart design solutions account for the environment they exist within, and each member of your audience has to navigate that every day. They’ll want to see your awareness of the greater context and how you’ve handled that in your projects.
What your full product design process looks like, end-to-end. Of the points above, this one is usually the more straightforward one. Your audience will want to be taken through each step of your design process, from wireframes and mockups to high-fidelity designs and prototypes. As part of this, they’ll also evaluate your visual design skills and taste.
Many of these points might build upon what you’ve covered in previous interviews, like the design recruiter screening call and hiring manager interview. You can also figure out additional points your audience might be interested in by doing research about the company and role.
There are many possible ways to weave these points into your portfolio presentation, and it’ll depend on your projects and experience. Because of that, I’ve found it less helpful to advise a “one size fits all” approach; rather, it’s more helpful to identify effective tools to use when approaching an ambitious stage like the portfolio presentation. These tools comprise an overall preparation strategy, which enables you to manage and wrangle the overall process of creating your presentation (which can otherwise become unruly, overwhelming, and stress-inducing). So, what do those tools look like?
Preparation strategy (How and when should I get started?)
Above: A typical workflow for creating a portfolio presentation. While the earliest step is often the most challenging, the latter ones should converge more closely as you finalize your presentation.
Though it might seem as straightforward as putting your case studies into a slide deck format, the reality is that creating a strong, easy-to-follow presentation is far from a linear process.
In my own experience, my case studies were painstakingly written — it still took me weeks of work to translate them into a 45-minute presentation that I felt confident about.
When getting started on your presentation, I recommend following a few points:
Start preparing as early as you can — ideally, well before you get to the portfolio presentation part of the interview process.
Unlike whiteboarding challenges or take-home assignments, portfolio presentations are usually always included as a step in the product design interview process. And when you’re moving through a standard process, you might only have a week’s notice before you’re scheduled to give your presentation. That’s not a ton of time to put together a great presentation and practice it enough to feel confident with your material — so I recommend starting on your presentation as early as you can.
If you have the luxury of time, it’s best to start your portfolio presentation before you start looking for a new role. Once you actually start looking, you could quickly get wrapped up in job applications, phone screenings, research, and interviewing. And if you’re job hunting while balancing a full-time job, you might feel too drained to focus on an undertaking as significant as putting together a presentation.
If you’ve already started applying and interviewing, there are still benefits to starting your portfolio presentation before you get close to the presentation step. Working on your presentation well ahead of time will help you better articulate your experience and projects in interview settings, since your projects (and all the details) will be top of mind.
If you’re really pressed for time, try to give yourself at least 1.5-2 weeks for your presentation. You can check with the recruiter about when they’d advise you to schedule your presentation and if there’s any wiggle room for you to have a few extra days.
Use context clues to inform your overall narrative and what details you include.
At this point in the interview process, your case studies have been successful in getting you this far. But the portfolio presentation poses a few unique challenges:
You have to include the right amount of information — not too much, and not too little — to meet the time requirement.
Your information needs to resonate with the criteria that your audience is looking for. Your audience will likely be evaluating your presentation across a standardized internal rubric. But outside of tips you might receive from the recruiter, you might not know much else about what they’re looking for.
Both of these bullets point to the reality that you’ll need to curate the right information, and enough of it, to utilize the time effectively and prove to your audience that you’re a good fit for the role. But how can you know what details to include, what to leave out, and how to impress your audience when you’ve never met them before?
To accomplish this, I recommend using “context clues” to inform your presentation. That includes things like:
Criteria provided by the recruiter. Your recruiter should provide you with a description of what you’ll be expected to cover in your presentation. It could be as detailed as a PDF interviewing guide, or it could be as simple as a few bullet points in an email. When in doubt, ask your recruiter for clarification. They’ll be able to provide you with the most accurate information.
The job description and how your work aligns with it. The job description acts as the “source of truth” about what the role is and what the requirements are. Therefore, most of the content you choose to include in your presentation should match closely with details included in the job description.
Information gleaned from the rest of the interview loop, like what the recruiter or hiring manager has told you about the role. These insider details — points that might not have been listed in the job description or elsewhere online — will be valuable in hinting at what else your audience might also be looking for.
Your own research on the role, team, company, and industry. Having this information will help you tailor your presentation overall to the role at hand. For specifics on what research you can do, check out my other article here.
The backgrounds of your audience members. Looking into each of your panelists and finding out about their careers, backgrounds, and roles will help you identify additional opportunities to tailor your presentation to them. If you’re able to find out anything unique about your audience — for example, if one of your panelists has a background in accessibility — you can also leverage this to include smaller tidbits within your presentation that could pique their interest, like the accessibility considerations you made during your project. While these points might not be specific to the evaluation criteria, they’ll still benefit you in showing your audience that you care about their interests.
These points will guide you toward what your audience might be looking for. For example, if you know from the job description that the role is focused on designing a marketplace, then in your presentation you can include any projects you have that are most similar to that. Or if you know from the hiring manager interview that the role is on a newly created team, you can include details about how you worked on a scrappy, startup team and had to set up processes from scratch.
If you find yourself in a situation where you have too much information that you want to include in your presentation, these points will also be the jury by which you evaluate what details to cut. There’s a lot of ground to cover in your presentation, and even though you’ll have 45 minutes, time will go by quickly — and you don’t want to overload your audience with information. Each detail you choose to include should tie back to any of these points. And if they don’t, consider omitting it and replacing it with something that does.
Use Figma to brainstorm, iterate, get feedback, and compile your final presentation.
As tempting as it might be — especially if you’re short on time — avoid jumping into the slide deck straight away. Just as you’d sketch design solution concepts in a low-fidelity format, you should approach your presentation in the same way.
From the earliest stages of brainstorming and mindmapping to later on when you’re creating the slides for your actual presentation, I’ve found Figma to be the easiest way to organize the content and information. Specifically, this workflow has worked well:
Early stages: Use FigJam (or another whiteboarding software) to lay out ideas, brainstorm, and refine your narrative. FigJam’s format allows for easy manipulation and movement of your concepts, before you iron them out in the later stages.
Mid stages: Bring content into Figma as you start to refine your material. Lay out slides and start mapping your ideas to specific ones. Then, check to see if the narrative flow makes sense. Get feedback from someone else before you start ironing out the visuals and text.
Late stages: Add visuals, text, and materials (like designs, prototypes, etc.) to the slides. Check in periodically with the overall narrative to make sure it flows logically — you can do this by reviewing your slides in full, or reviewing sections every so often.
Left: Brainstorming the presentation in FigJam. Right: Iterating on the slides in Figma.
While we’re only able to cover the workflow at a high level in this article, I’ll cover the steps and workflow more in depth in another one.
Approach it as an iterative, rather than linear, process. Incorporate refinement at each step.
I’ve seen candidates get discouraged when they can’t wrangle their case studies to fit into the presentation format. In reality, the process of creating a strong presentation requires constant refinement as you whittle down your material into a sharper, clearer story.
This process has many similarities to writing. The following passage from On Writing Well serves as a metaphor for a constructive approach to your presentation (with “rewriting” being revising, “writing” being delivering a presentation, “reader” being your audience, and “sentence” being your presentation):
“Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it’s where the game is won or lost. That idea is hard to accept. We all have an emotional equity in our first draft; we can’t believe that it wasn’t born perfect. But the odds are close to 100 percent that it wasn’t. Most writers don’t initially say what they want to say, or say it as well as they could.
What do I mean by ‘rewriting’? I don’t mean writing one draft and then writing a different second version, and then a third. Most rewriting consists of reshaping and tightening and refining the raw material you wrote on your first try. Much of it consists of making sure you’ve given the reader a narrative flow they can follow with no trouble from beginning to end. Keep putting yourself in the reader’s place. Is there something they should have been told early in the sentence that you put near the end?”
The flowchart at the top of this section illustrates the iterative nature of creating a good portfolio presentation. The process of reviewing and revising your content can help you identify gaps in your logic or areas to improve your delivery.
This iterative approach is also more forgiving. Rather than getting frustrated or stressed out over struggling with your presentation, you can trust that refinement is a natural part of the process — and ultimately helps your presentation land more successfully with your audience. The time and effort spent in refining always pays off.
Get feedback from others. Ideally, get feedback between each step of the above process.
It’s crucial to get another pair of eyes and ears on your material as you progress with your presentation. They’ll be able to provide feedback about where they get confused along the way or if your material could be reinforced somehow.
I’d recommend checking in with someone at each of the following points, if possible:
Once you have a good outline of the material you’re thinking of covering. Run your low-fidelity material by someone who can advise if your projects and ideas seem effective enough to flush out further. Ideally, try to get feedback from another designer.
Once you’ve created a rough draft of your presentation. When you have the slides laid out in a mid-fidelity format, with enough material and visuals to accurately convey your points, get feedback again. This could be from another designer or anyone else, like friends or family. They’ll be able to advise if your presentation makes sense and if it’s easy to follow.
Once you’ve created a final draft of your presentation. When you feel confident enough about your material and you have it in a presentation-ready format, arrange a practice runthrough with an audience. This could be friends, family, mentors, or others who will be able to provide feedback. I recommend getting together a group that’s roughly the same size as your actual audience (4-6 people). With that, you’ll be able to simulate an actual presentation environment, and it’ll take the pressure off you for the day of your real presentation.
Practice talking through your material out loud throughout the process.
This technique is a powerful way of evaluating your material with a new perspective. To quote again from On Writing Well:
“When you read your writing aloud [...] you’ll hear a dismaying number of places where you lost the reader, or confused the reader, or failed to tell them the one thing they needed to know, or told them the same thing twice: the inevitable loose ends of every early draft. What you must do is make an arrangement — one that holds together from start to finish and that moves with economy and warmth.”
By reading your presentation out loud, you can hear your material more clearly. I recommend you start doing this as soon as you have an outline: try talking through each of your points as if you’re giving your presentation.
Even if you’re improvising at first, you’ll start getting ideas about additional details you might want to include or new ways of framing certain points. Those are tidbits you can make note of and incorporate throughout the rest of your process. And as you narrow in on your final presentation, having frequently practiced out loud will help you remember your material better — and feel more comfortable and confident — than if you wait to practice until your presentation is right around the corner.
The portfolio presentation will test your skills as a designer and communicator. It’s the step of the interview process that requires the most time, effort, and work — but when done well, it has the potential to crystallize your audience’s perception that you’re the right person for the role and team.
Keep an eye out for future articles covering a recommended format, workflow, and tips for presenting your portfolio effectively. Good luck! 👍
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