Career Strategy Podcast with Sarah Doody | UX, Product Design, UX Research

UX portfolio approaches based on seniority or role. That question lands in Sarah Doody's inbox nearly every day. Does the approach actually need to change? This episode answers a real question from a listener targeting director level UX roles, wondering if the portfolio frameworks taught inside Career Strategy Lab only apply to individual contributors.

The process for building a strong UX portfolio doesn't change based on your job title. That's the real answer buried in a question Sarah gets constantly, usually from people convinced their situation is the exception.

This time it came from a listener targeting director level UX roles, wondering if the frameworks taught inside Career Strategy Lab only apply to individual contributors. Sarah's answer: no.

Three reasons why. A portfolio's job stays the same no matter your title or years of experience. UX recruiters and hiring managers are always answering the same core questions. The way a portfolio gets consumed doesn't change either. A role gets 500 applications in 48 hours.

Every portfolio gets skimmed and scanned, not read word for word. And what makes a portfolio good is consistent across roles too. Answer the so what behind your decisions. Not just what you did.

Gamified, operating system style portfolios are trending on LinkedIn right now. Sarah explains why they create friction instead of clarity for a recruiter trying to move fast. Then there's what-ifing. Hunting for UX portfolio advice specific to your exact job title, years of experience, or city. That search doesn't exist, and it's costing you time you don't have.

If your job title or seniority level has you wondering whether you need a different UX portfolio strategy, this episode settles it.

Topics Discussed
✅ Why the three questions UX recruiters and hiring managers are actually trying to answer never change, no matter your job title
✅ How the "jobs to be done" framework applies to your UX portfolio, and what your portfolio's actual job is
✅ What happens when a UX role gets 500 applications in 48 hours, and how that changes what your portfolio needs to survive
✅ Why talking only about what you did is the most common UX portfolio mistake, and what answering the "so what" actually looks like in a case study
✅ Why operating system style UX portfolios are trending on LinkedIn right now, and why they're probably working against you
✅ The real cost of constantly asking "what if" about your specific UX job title, years of experience, or city instead of just building your portfolio
✅ What went wrong with an early UX portfolio back in 2006, and what fixing it actually looked like

Links & Resources
🔗 Episode 155, Sarah's interview with Patrick Neeman, Director of UX and AI Experiences at Workday
🔗 Episode 173, Sarah's interview with Jeni Bible, UX Manager at Home Depot
🔗 Episode 172, Sarah's interview with Alexander Zeh, Head of Product Design at ManyChat
🔗 Episode 192, Sarah's interview with Sylvain Maretto, Director of Design at Ecosia
🔗 Episode 161, Sarah's interview with Jared Tredly, Design Recruiter at Shopify
🔗 Episode 188, UX Portfolio Myth: Your UX Portfolio Does Not Need To Be A Website (Myth 2/5)

🎯 How I can help with your UX job search
📋 Get my UX case study template
👋 Follow me, on LinkedIn, Instagram, & YouTube

UX hiring managers are looking for three things right now, and UX isn't specifically one of them. Not exactly reassuring if you've spent years polishing your process pages. That's the reality Sylvain Maretto lays out in this episode, and it's coming from someone actually reviewing applications, not theorizing about them.

At the time of this recording, Sylvain was the director of design at Ecosia, the search engine that funds tree planting with its profits. He's spent 15 years building and leading design teams across Berlin, Tokyo, and beyond, with stops at Omio (joined when it was 25 people), Zalando, Tour Radar, and GetYourGuide. He also helped seal the acquisition of Holoplot, the audio technology behind the sound system inside the Vegas Sphere.

He joined Sarah after leaving a comment on a LinkedIn post arguing portfolios need to be more experimental. He disagreed, and what follows is his actual answer: a triangle of AI fluency, UI craft, and business acumen. UX gets treated as a given, not a differentiator.

From there, Sylvain walks through what happens inside an applicant tracking system when 500 people apply for one role. Why the AI built into most of those tools produces noise instead of signal. What a job description is actually telling you, if you read it twice. And how to talk about results when a project got canceled before it ever shipped.

If you've ever wondered what's actually happening on the other side of your application, this is that answer.

Topics Discussed
✅ The three things Sylvain actually screens for when he opens a portfolio, and UX isn't one of them
✅ What happens to your application the second it lands in an ATS, and why you're one of 500 people applying for the same slot
✅ Why the AI built into most hiring software is, in Sylvain's own words, mostly noise
✅ The STAR framework he wants every case study to follow, and why your "action" section is probably too long
✅ What to say about a project that got canceled or never shipped, when you still need to show results
✅ How reading a job description twice instead of once changes what you should actually be highlighting
✅ Whether hiring managers expect different things by country, or if it's really just about company stage
✅ Why Sylvain thinks a narrow, specific niche beats trying to check every box on a job post
✅ The values-based signal he built into his own hiring process at Ecosia that most candidates don't see coming

Links & Resources
🔗 Connect with Sylvain on LinkedIn
🔗 Learn more about Ecosia
🔗 Sarah's book: The Product of You
🔗 Ioana Teleanu's LinkedIn post that started this conversation

🎯 How I can help with your UX job search
📋 Get my UX case study template
👋 Follow me, on LinkedIn, Instagram, & YouTube

Adding personality to your UX portfolio is one of the most repeated pieces of advice in the industry, and Sarah closes out her five part portfolio myth series by explaining why it's actually working against you. Personality and passion don't get you the interview. Proof does. That's the whole myth this episode takes apart.

Sarah argues that trying to inject personality into a portfolio usually competes with the actual content instead of supporting it. A font chosen to feel "personal" can make a case study harder to read. Extra design elements, background flourishes, or animation pull attention away from the work itself, and animation in particular can even make some viewers physically ill. A personal logo shrunk down to fit a slide often becomes illegible. None of it proves you can do the job you're applying for, which is the one thing recruiters and hiring managers are actually scanning for.

She backs this up with a line from Steph McDonald, lead recruiter at HubSpot focused on UX design roles, who compares a well edited portfolio to a fashion designer who puts on all her jewelry, then takes a few pieces off before walking out the door. The move isn't to avoid adding things you care about, it's going back afterward and cutting what isn't earning its place. Sarah's takeaway is direct, less personality, more evidence that you've done what the job description is asking for.

This episode also wraps the full five part series. Sarah runs through a fast recap of all five myths, from project count to portfolio websites to showing failed work, and asks listeners who followed along to share whether it changed how they think about their own portfolio.

Topics Discussed
✅ Why personality and passion don't get you an interview, and what actually does
✅ How trying to show personality through fonts, animation, or design flourishes can work against your portfolio instead of for it
✅ Why a personal logo in your portfolio often backfires once it's shrunk down to a smaller size
✅ What Steph McDonald, lead recruiter at HubSpot focused on UX design roles, said about editing a portfolio before you hit send
✅ Why Sarah says the goal is proof over personality, and what that actually looks like in practice
✅ A full recap of all five UX portfolio myths covered across the series
✅ Where to learn more about Career Strategy Lab if your portfolio has been stuck in redesign mode for months

Links & Resources
🔗 Episode 168 of the Career Strategy Podcast, Sarah's full interview with Steph McDonald
🔗 Episode 187, Myth 1 of 5, on why you don't need three to five projects in your portfolio
🔗 Episode 188, Myth 2 of 5, on why your portfolio doesn't need to be a website
🔗 Episode 189, Myth 3 of 5, on why your case studies don't need to show the full UX process
🔗 Episode 190, Myth 4 of 5, on why you can show projects that didn't launch

🎯 How I can help with your UX job search
📋 Get my UX case study template
👋 Follow me, on LinkedIn, Instagram, & YouTube

UX portfolio projects that didn't launch or didn't go as planned are exactly the kind of work recruiters and hiring managers want to see, not the kind you should hide.

This is week four of a five part series on UX portfolio myths, and this episode tackles the belief that a canceled, pivoted, or unsuccessful project doesn't belong in your portfolio.

Sarah pushes back on this directly. Smart hiring managers understand that things go wrong in real UX work all the time, and a project that didn't launch says nothing about whether you're a good researcher or designer.

In fact, she argues that a messy or canceled project is one of the best opportunities to show how you adapt, collaborate, and think under real constraints, exactly the soft skills recruiters are trying to evaluate.

She walks through common scenarios people worry about, like research getting cut entirely or not being able to run usability testing, and gives specific ways to handle each one in a portfolio.

Rather than hiding the gap, she suggests explaining what happened, what you did instead, and what you would do differently with a do-over, which turns a limitation into a chance to show your thinking.

She backs this up with a clip from her interview with Jeni Bible, a UX Manager at Home Depot and a Career Strategy Lab alum who is now hiring herself. Jeni's take is simple, projects get canceled constantly, and what she actually wants to hear is what you did, what you learned, and how you collaborated along the way.

If you've been sitting on a portfolio project you assumed was too messy or unfinished to include, this episode makes the case for why it might be exactly what you need.

Topics Discussed
✅ Why a project that didn't launch doesn't signal that you're a bad researcher or designer
✅ How to handle a portfolio project where research got cut or skipped entirely
✅ What to include if you never got to run usability testing on something you worked on
✅ The "do-over" framing Sarah recommends for showing what research or testing you would have done in hindsight
✅ What Jeni Bible, a UX Manager at Home Depot and Career Strategy Lab alum, said she actually wants to hear about canceled projects
✅ Why a canceled or pivoted project can be one of the strongest ways to show adaptability and collaboration
✅ A preview of the fifth and final myth in the series, coming next week

Links & Resources
🔗 Episode 173 of the Career Strategy Podcast, Sarah's full interview with Jeni Bible on hiring and portfolios
🔗 Episode 187, Myth 1 of 5, on why you don't need three to five projects in your portfolio
🔗 Episode 188, Myth 2 of 5, on why your portfolio doesn't need to be a website
🔗 Episode 189, Myth 3 of 5, on why your case studies don't need to show the full UX process

🎯 How I can help with your UX job search
📋 Get my UX case study template
👋 Follow me, on LinkedIn, Instagram, & YouTube

UX portfolio case studies don't need to walk through every single step of your process, and trying to do that is actually working against you. This is week three of a five part series on UX portfolio myths, and this episode tackles a big one, the belief that every case study needs to show the whole end to end process for a project.

Sarah argues the opposite works better. Going deep into just one or two parts of a project beats trying to cram in everything you did, especially for projects that spanned six months, a year, or longer. Trying to show it all just skims the surface of everything and overwhelms the person reviewing it, which is the opposite of what you want.

She backs this up with a clip from her interview with Alexander Zeh, former Head of Product Design at ManyChat, who said he's specifically listening for problem solving language, phrases like "I facilitated," "I unblocked," "I synthesized," because those signal maturity in how a candidate thinks, not just what they produced.

The bulk of the episode is a screen share walkthrough where Sarah rebuilds a weak case study slide by slide, showing exactly what it looks like to go from a shallow "next, I made some wireframes" slide into one that explains the problem, the decision, the reasoning, and the impact. If your case studies currently read like a list of what you did, this episode shows you exactly what to change and why.

Topics Discussed
✅ Why cramming your entire UX process into one case study actually works against you
✅ What Alexander Zeh, former Head of Product Design at ManyChat, said he's actually listening for in a portfolio walkthrough
✅ A live screen share breakdown showing the difference between a shallow case study slide and one that goes deep
✅ Why "next, I made some wireframes" is what Sarah calls a five alarm fire in a portfolio
✅ How to handle a case study for a project that spanned six months, a year, or longer without trying to cram in everything
✅ What questions your case study should actually be answering, beyond just what you did
✅ Why you might choose to highlight different parts of the same long project depending on the specific role you're applying for

Links & Resources
🔗 Episode 172 of the Career Strategy Podcast, the full interview with Alexander Zeh, former Head of Product Design at ManyChat
🔗 Episode 187, Myth 1 of 5, on why you don't need three to five projects in your portfolio
🔗 Episode 188, Myth 2 of 5, on why your portfolio doesn't need to be a website

🎯 How I can help with your UX job search
📋 Get my UX case study template
👋 Follow me, on LinkedIn, Instagram, & YouTube