Creating a product portfolio to showcase your work as an experienced PM
The recent economic downturn caused by COVID-19 isn’t only impacting hospitality, travel, and services industries. Furloughs and layoffs are also impacting tech companies. In the last 2-3 weeks, layoffs and furloughs in NYC have hit startups such as Zola, Away, Managed by Q, Loftsmart, Blueground, Convene, WeWork, Compass, Knotel, and Eight Sleep.
I hope these furloughs and layoffs are short-term and the economy bounces quickly back. However, we have to plan for a downturn in the hiring market. Thus, for recently laid off product managers who are searching for product jobs, what can you do besides updating your resume?
Designers have Dribbble and Behance. Developers use github and stakeoverflow. What about product managers?
Unfortunately, there isn’t a single place or format for product managers to showcase their portfolio. But that doesn’t mean you can’t create one yourself.
How to create a portfolio* of work to showcase your product management skills
1.Define what skills and experiences you want to showcase.
Having worked as a product manager for a couple of years, hopefully you’ll have a variety of different experiences to highlight. Because your experiences will be unique to your industry, company, and team, reflecting on which experience or skills to highlight will be key to finding the right next role.
Perhaps you focused more on product delivery, and managed the development of a complex feature launch. Maybe you wrote lots of SQL to perform conversion analysis. Or you worked on product discovery and conducted extensive user interviews with a product designer to unpack a difficult problem. Maybe you worked with a visionary founder to help structure and execute against that vision.
Defining what part of your work experiences and skills you want to showcase and why is critical to helping interviewers understand both your strengths and weaknesses.
Tips:
When targeting APM or PM roles in a company with an established product organization (e.g., 5+ PMs), focus upon your delivery and execution skills. While some product leader wants to be able to have a dialogue with you about product strategy and vision, be realistic and understand that you aren’t being hired to set the company’s or product vision. Sure, you can influence it at some point, but that’s unlikely to be day 1. If this is hard to read, you should then go start your own company.
When targeting SPM or PM roles that are more senior (e.g., 1st PM hire), your product portfolio should showcase execution and vision influencing/setting skills. While you’ll still be expected to get your hands dirty as an individual contributor, you’ll be asked to solve more complex product problems with more difficult trade-off equations. It’s helpful to use data and intuition (i.e., experience, gut) to explain how you resolved those trade-offs when you made a decision.
Pick work experiences you’re proud of, not what you think someone wants to hear. This is because if you’re proud of it, it likely signals you’ve had to overcome some difficult challenge to reach the end result. You had to struggle, which means you’re learning and learning is a good thing.
Don’t shy away from pointing out failure in outcomes. Good hiring managers will want to see examples of how you’ve struggled through a challenge, even if the results were a failure. However, a consistent list of failed products, initiatives, or projects isn’t a great signal. We’re human after all and have biases against failures.
2.Sketch some ideas via pen and paper before you start a slide deck
I am no artist. My penmanship is so bad that sometimes, I can’t read my own handwriting. But even I recommend everyone start sketching out with a pen and paper what you want to present, before you move to your favorite digital tool. Why?
Your portfolio is meant to be visual. The less visual version is called a resume, which is clocked full of words. Don’t create a portfolio that is your resume, only with more words.
Portfolios are a discussion aid, used by you during the interview process. This ensures you will give verbal commentary when showcasing your work, again, reducing the need to use more words.
Even standalone, portfolios are showcases of work. Did you create an excel model to forecast impact on the conversion funnel? Show that visually. How about defining requirements? Include a screenshot of the requirements document. Show, don’t tell applies to your portfolio.
Sketching with pen and paper is faster for most people than digital manipulation (unless you’re a designer with a Wacom tablet). Set a timer for 25 minutes and sketch away.
This sketching process allows you to organize your portfolio presentation quickly in low fidelity, before you move to higher fidelity. Done well, it’ll save you time from rework.
3.Collect prior work and clean them up to support your sketch idea
Look over your sketches and examine what supporting deliverables you’ll need to collect for your portfolio.
Remember that financial model? Maybe you can’t show the exact numbers but you could scrub the details away and show that instead. Maybe you can’t discuss the explicit results of the A/B test, but you can simulate how it was created, how you calculated the results, and showcase the outcome. By taking time to collect work you created, you’ll know whether you have assets ready to use in your portfolio and how much clean up work you might need to do.
4.Explain the thinking, not just the what was created
Your portfolio now should include several projects with deliverables, assets, or other documentation that can showcase your work. You’ll also have a nice set of examples of what skills or areas you want to highlight during the interview.
But showing the final results of your work isn’t enough. You have to explain to the interviewer, what constraints, considerations, and choices you made during the process of creating those deliverables.
Why did you write all those SQL queries to do the analysis? Why didn’t your company have a BI tool? Why didn’t you implement one on the cheap? Why was this part of the analysis so important? What other initiative did you forgo? Would you make the same decision if you could re-do it?
Bringing the interviewer along to understand the situation and why you did showcases not only the tactical execution skills, but demonstrates explicitly the type of consideration you made, and which area you valued more or less.
5.Putting it all together.
Now’s when you turn it digitally. For most individuals who don’t come from a design background, I recommend using Google slides. It’s easy to create and share.
Sample Product Portfolio Template | My Product Portfolio as Example
* Key assumptions
You have 2 - 5 years of product management experience to highlight, regardless if you’ve transitioned from a different role (prior work experience) or started in product management after finishing university
You don’t have direct people management experience. Being part of a hiring process/team where you’ve interviewed other product managers or mentor peers is commendable, but isn’t the same.
You are focused on landing an individual contributor product role (e.g., PM, SPM).
Additional reading / Research that helped me write this article