What I Look For in a Senior Designer Portfolio at a Consumer-Facing Early Stage Startup
I recently completed the process of hiring for a Head of Design role at my current company and was surprised when I couldn’t find much quality content anywhere (YouTube, Medium, even Google) on how to assess a designer’s portfolio, especially a designer for a senior leadership position.
My guess is that’s because whether you like someone’s designs are relatively more subjective than whether you like a product manager’s approach, but I still think there are many traits that we can systematically identify when looking for a strong designer.
There are, after all, clear design best practices around what is “good” and “bad” design, so let’s use that toolbox to our advantage.
Customizing my recruiting process
Before we get into my portfolio criteria, here’s some brief context on our company and what’s important to us so you can see how you might customize your own hiring criteria.
Since my current company is in very early stages (pre-product market fit), I personally look over each designer’s portfolio before I or others on my team interview them.
I do have recruiters and HR folks who vet profiles before they ever get to me, but given how important this role is to our mission and success, I make sure that I’ve given a portfolio the thumbs up before I ask myself, my teammates or our founder to spend time with them.
Skill-level-wise, we’re looking for someone who can fulfill the role of head of design. They have a strong command of UX and visual design, can run user interviews, help us discover what to build, and create designs when requirements are still in motion.
The team is small and extremely talented, so each of us needs to be able to effortlessly flow at the pace others might consider sprinting (while juggling large amounts of uncertainty).
We’re a non-profit, but design and technology-wise we operate more with a B2C mindset because our founder comes from the B2C world (he created Shopzilla, which he later sold to become TikTok).
Our product is also consumer-facing (donors and recipients). This means that we have an extremely high visual design and UX bar when looking at portfolios, so I index heavily on portfolios.
When I receive someone’s file, I first look at their portfolio to understand their quality of work, then their resume, and finally their short answers to the questions on the application form before meeting them for an interview.
No need to look at their resume or applications answers — no matter how impressive—if their portfolio shows that they don’t have the type of design skills and aesthetic that we’re looking for.
If you work at a B2B company and you need to hire a designer to work on an internal tool, your process probably doesn’t index as highly on portfolio design.
What I look for in a designer portfolio
1. Beautiful and intuitive visual and UX design.
The first thing I pay attention to when I land on someone’s site is the first impression I have of them. I can usually immediately tell if they have an eye for B2C design that matches what I’m looking for.
This is pretty intuitive, which is okay. I rely on both subjective (my gut) and objective measures of design to try to get to the best answer.
Since I want this article to be tactically useful for you, here are some snippets of good portfolios I’ve seen.
Example 1.
Example 2.
In this step, I’m just seeing if the site looks good, is easy to use, and generally a good experience.
Does it help me get to know this person, or does it leave me feeling frustrated because I’m lost in the navigation or it took me somewhere I wasn’t expecting to go? Are there buttons that look like buttons but actually aren’t?
2. Frames the problem well
Behind every good design, answer, decision, or learning is a good question.
Asking the right questions doesn’t always give you the right answer, but asking the wrong question will almost definitely get you the wrong answer.
So — once I get a feel for the overall design style and usability of the website, I jump straight into the case studies.
I look very closely at how they framed their problem statement or what problem they were charged with solving.
I was surprised at how many portfolios jumped straight into their answer of how they solved it without taking a moment to express what they were trying to solve.
When I’m flipping through portfolios, I don’t always have the full context of whether a question was 100% the right question to ask (I wasn’t there), but it should convey why the problem or question is important to their product and mission.
I should be able to understand it immediately, and it should be compelling.
3. Brings expertise & inspiration.
Did they spend 6 months tweaking a sub-feature that was probably spec’ed out to death, or did they figure out how to solve a greenfield problem in a very eloquent and practical way?
Given where we are as a company, it’s important that a designer has 0 to 1 experience.
And not only am I looking for someone who’s built something out of nothing, I’m also looking for someone who inspires me.
Once I framed who I was looking for in this way (“do you inspire me?”), it was much easier to sort through the portfolios and resumes.
I started asking myself other questions, like “will I learn more and become a better product person working with you?”
4. Answers the case study problem with just the right amount of detail.
This is where I’m looking for the impact this person had.
I’m looking for succinct but holistic. Show your math, but don’t drag me through the glass.
I found that a lot of junior designers tend to go a little overboard here. There were a lot of portfolios that showed every step of their design process, which can be good, but usually a good summarization will also get the point across.
Sifting through the “answer” piece of the portfolio is where I try to understand their process.
It’s basically the place where a designer is answering the question, “How did you figure out what to build/design?”
Of course, everyone knows to dutifully responds to the question with “user testing” so I look for a few layers of depth on top of that.
User testing is great for learning and testing your assumptions, but often times it doesn’t give you a clear answer and instead gives you more questions.
Plus, we all know now that you don’t go to your customers and ask them “what would you like me to build?” so the problem solving logic really can’t stop at user testing.
There are a number of additional layers to answer the question, “how did you decide what to build,” including hypotheses testing, riskiest assumption testing, and continuous discovery.
Finally, the cherry on top is when designers quantify or show the impact that their solution and designs had as a result of their process. This is rare and I know it can be hard to do, but it also sets you apart from the rest when you do this.
Tl;dr
For a role where incredible skill in B2C visual and UX design are paramount, we index heavily on portfolios.
Here’s what I look for:
1. Beautiful and intuitive visual and UX design.
2. Frames the problem well.
3. Brings expertise & inspiration.
4. Answers the problem with just the right amount of detail.
Designers are incredibly powerful — they’re the ones who make ideas come to live. For a species that heavily depends on sight and visualization, design is a superpower.
I hope this was useful to you in your journey to find your designer.
If you have any questions or suggestions on how I can improve my search criteria, post it in the comments! I’m always curious to learn more from the larger community.
