🎯 how to ace the 20% of portfolio that can land you a job interview?

You don't need to exert too much effort in order to achieve amazing results; instead, just learn where to focus your efforts. Learn how to make a winning portfolio with Pareto rule!👇

Hello 👋, and welcome to this week’s ✨ ADPList’s Weekly Pulse ✨ - a community-only newsletter delivered every Tuesday. We tackle your questions about design, product, working with humans, and anything else that’s stressing you out at the office.

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🔥 This Week’s Hot Sessions

1. ✨ UX Documentation // UX Talk - Nov 21, 09:30 am PT (RSVP)

2. ✨3 steps to communicating your transferable skills - Nov 23, 3:00 pm (GMT +05:30) (RSVP)

3. ✨B2B Performance Advertising For Your Business - Nov 24, 09:00 am PT (RSVP)

4. ✨Product Management Simplified - Nov 25, 08:30 pm PT (RSVP)

5. ✨Keep your app on diet [Android | UX | Image Optim] - Nov 26, 03:00 am PT (RSVP)

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🔥 What 20% of your portfolio should you concentrate on to achieve greater results?

Phase 1: The Case Study Structure

1- Introduction — Scenario/Problem/Goal

What issue are you attempting to resolve, what objectives do you have for the project, and what precisely are you attempting to accomplish? 

By considering what your project is all about, you would be able to draft an effective introduction. For instance, you might only be working on a few features of a company's product while employed there, therefore you should explain how you decided that those features needed to be developed in the first place.

This screenshot was taken from Nicolas Pellegrino’s portfolio

The screenshot was taken from Jonny Czar’s portfolio

2 - Your role in the project

This is one of the most critical aspects of your application. Once a recruiter likes your resume and the projects you worked on, they would want to know your role in driving the success of the project and the part you enjoyed the most.

Example:

The screenshot was taken from Jonny Czar’s portfolio

3 - Users

Who are the clients of your clients, and who are the clients of the company you work for? Who will be using the product?

We usually see the personas in this part of the portfolio. But personas aren’t an obligation, you can also describe the user in a few lines or represent them in a different graphic, it all depends on the type of project you were working on.

This screenshot was taken from Joshua’s portfolio

4 - Design Process

How did you overcome the design challenges along the way, and how did you prioritize what should be built?

Now, we all face challenges while working on a project, something might not go as expected, your research could not bring the expected results, making you change the direction, or you realized that whatever tools you wanted to build would cost more than it’s a return to the product, so you had to find a cheaper way of solving the problem.

5- What tools did you use in this project?

This can be very valuable to the recruiter because they are typically looking for somebody with skills using some tools, they normally mention tools in the job description, and the best way you can prove to have that skills is by showing that you used them in your projects.

The screenshot was taken from Jonny Czar’s portfolio

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Phase 2: The 20% effort that you should be making 💡

You can have a detailed explanation of your case study, but if you don't do this, you might put in 80% of your effort and receive only 20%, or not even 20% as an outcome. This 20% is the most important aspect of any portfolio. Without a compelling story, nothing can ever succeed.

An example of a case study storyline::

We had ''this'' problem, so we did our research and arrived at ''this'' possibility of solving the problem, we designed, we tested, we fixed, we tested, we fixed, we launched, and we got a result of ''this size'' impact and we found out we can still improve ''that'' and ''that'' in order to achieve a ''certain goal'' in a ''certain time''.

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