You don’t need mentors to tweak your portfolio — you need to start over

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Bootcamp

21 min readSep 5, 2022

Product design appears to be attracting more interest from wider culture, which likely explains the increase in universities offering programs teaching it — programs that didn’t exist even just a few, short years ago! It likely also explains the rise of bootcamps that offer design as a concentration.

This is pretty cool, in my view. Product design is a great industry! And, besides, if universities hope to remain in business, it makes sense they would try to do what other successful businesses do: sell products that actually generate value for their customers. Namely: courses and programs that have practical, industry application, that set their incredibly sacrificing customers (hopeful students and their hardworking families) up for advantages in the job market. Ditto with bootcamps, which are a great way to escape the enormous pricing of universities. You can get a great education — at a fraction of the cost! Right?

Weeeeeeell…

For no particular reason, I’ve been closely mentoring early career designers over the last few months. Of the ones I’ve mentored, the bulk of them completed the Google certification course, while around three come from university programs (with one graduating from a university I had an offer from years ago! They didn’t have that program then — that’s pretty cool!). The more students I took on, the more I realized that all their work looked the same — whether they came from bootcamps or universities, whether their programs were three months or four years long, etc. I’ve reviewed over forty portfolios from early career designers in the last two months, mainly student portfolios from Google’s course. What I notice is that I see work that looks like it’s intended for some other industry other than the one I’m in. I don’t see anything recognizable in these portfolios.

I don’t write this to blame students for mostly not getting an ROI from the programs of their choice — after all, they are responding to market pressures and simple incentives, as any consumer would. Product design is a lucrative field so, naturally, people are going to try to sell you things by convincing you that they have the formula you must follow to get you into this great industry. Many of those selling these services likely sincerely believe that they do offer a leg up to students, too. And students, not knowing any better, are trusting that these curricula are formulated by people with industry and market knowledge, and that they will walk out with portfolios that are attractive to employers. Unfortunately, this trust is misplaced.

What’s all this, then?

You might be out of a bootcamp, or close to graduating from your Master’s program, or you might have finished out a few months of the Google design cert. Regardless, you are having a hard time finding a job, and you might even have debt to pay. You’re probably anxious, and comparing yourself to the lucky few around your skill level who’ve gotten jobs. You are probably wondering what’s wrong with you and feeling very badly. I really, sincerely feel for you. That said, you have a few options, and they’re not necessarily either/or:

Find a bunch of mentors to tell you to shuffle things around in your portfolio, or tell you to change wording on things. Make images bigger or smaller, change your hero image, add a personal tagline, add these words to your resume, remove those same words, etc. Probably lots of conflicting advice,
Try to find people who will refer you to companies,
Try another bootcamp, class, or program,
Give up,
Explore another ladder in the industry (e.g., product management, software engineering, etc.),
Find someone in the field who is very skilled and, because of this, will have the temerity to tell you the truth about the quality of the education you received.

Can we just reset real quick?

As a professional, you’re selling services (i.e., your skills) to customers (e.g., companies). To participate effectively on the market (i.e., get customers reliably), you have to understand the market, your customers, and what they tend to buy — all with the express intent of making your offering an attractive service for purchase.

So, to get around this monumental task before you, you bought a service that you trusted (e.g., bootcamp, university program, course, etc.) to do all that market research for you, and develop a tested curriculum with the promise that, if you followed it reasonably closely, would get you acquiring those customers (jobs) reliably.

Okay, but, obviously, you’re sitting there with quite a lot of debt, working the same job(s) you were working before you started that program (or unemployed), with few callbacks, and no hope to pay down your debts, so you’re probably feeling like you got sold a service that, ultimately, did not improve your chances with your customers, after all. Experiencing this with perfect hindsight, you might be way more skeptical of their services after having had them rendered. In other words, you might be feeling scammed.

You should listen to that voice in the back of your head, because it’s right. What you bought was something that misrepresented your target industry, with a curriculum that was not realistic, resulting in a body of work (i.e., portfolio) that will not attract many (or any) customers. People have asked me why I think these programs have such a problem with accuracy. It’s hard to speculate (so, naturally, I’m going to do it anyway!), but there are likely many reasons for this:

People keep buying it, regardless, as it can be very difficult to determine clearly what the outcomes really are in these programs, so there’s not a strong incentive to improve. Low consumer awareness concerning outcomes is something traditional programs (i.e., universities) also feature, but, eventually, as we’ve seen with universities, consumer awareness does catch up,
The curricula is likely designed by people who have never been product designers, themselves, so they often have very little understanding of the market you want to be in. The business model attracts customers (i.e., you), so it works, and everyone else just copies what the original bootcamp did,— even universities — regardless of whether or not students get outcomes on the market (see above). With no incentive to improve, nothing changes, and more of them continue to crop up. The sheer volume of these programs only convinces students further that there is some utility in them (see: social proof), despite not actually providing any value in reality,
The people who design these curricula read books from 1960s theoreticians that told them this is “how design is done” and they sincerely believe that. As a result, they sell that theory as repeatable packages, whether or not those packages are accurately representing the market. It’s about replicating the counsel provided in art theory books, rather than representing reality on the market as it truly is. They may sincerely not realize that there is a large gulf of difference between what the theoreticians are saying and what it’s actually like to sell your services on a market as a designer of software, however.

Importantly, I want to raise a counterfactual to some of the marketing from these programs: for those of us who got started as product designers in the past (even just a handful of years ago!), we did all of it before any of these programs existed. I’m talking about people you likely know from Design Twitter, or other influencers on Medium or YouTube — people you probably look up to. There were no bootcamps or other large programs at that time. If all of us who got started in the past could do so for free, so can you. And probably in less time, with less effort. Bootcamps are new, not required. None of us had those, and we got on just fine. A discerning mind goes a long way!

What now?

So you bought information from people with large, cognitive distortions about your market and target customers, and it probably cost you a lot of time and/or money. You probably feel a host of negative feelings. Fear not! All things can be fixed. Here’s how:

Start over.

I don’t relish in saying this, but it is the truth. No matter how closely you followed that program, you would have never ended up with a hirable portfolio. You can keep trying to apply with what you have (you’ll likely get an opportunity eventually, but do you really want a job eventually? Rather than now?), but if you want more reliable leads in a shorter amount of time, you would do well to start over and put in more work into your portfolio than you have. All of us who have been in the industry for some time had to do this ourselves, so there’s no reason why you cannot, too.

I realize I am suggesting that you put in way more work than you may initially have thought was required, given the expectations set by these programs. If you feel that this is too much work for you to take on, and you feel that the investment required to get into the industry is too high, that is not a failure. Every individual is different, and the cost one is willing to pay for entry into an industry is a very personal, life decision that each individual has to make for themselves. Not everything is right for everyone. If you no longer want to pursue this path, you’ve just eliminated an industry for you not to invest in further, and you can now turn your focus on to finding another career that works better for you — that is a success!

But there’s no other way around this cost you must pay, despite it not being in dollars — there are not a lot of shortcuts to the work you will need to put in. It’s pure elbow grease. As Trevor Nielsen brilliantly writes:

The difference between you and your dream design career is consistent effort over a long period of time. … Look for shortcuts. If you find them, take [them] … [But] I promise you, there aren’t many...

The reason I suggest you start over is because your visual design needs some serious work, and your case studies do not pass the “reasonable person” test. To reiterate, you need:

Good visual design,
Serious case studies (no less than two, no more than three). You’ll need to put them in a portfolio online, but also you’ll need to put these in a presentation format for when you’re in hiring pipelines.

If you do want to continue down this road to a product design career (you don’t have to!), and what I’ve said has not deterred you, then the rest is for you.

What do you mean by “good visual design”?

I’m talking about traditional graphic design. You should be good at aesthetics. There are people who say that product designers are not — and should never be — visual designers. That’s fine, I’m glad they feel that way, but if your work looks unprofessional, people will dislike that and pass you up for opportunities. With great visual design skills, you get more leads. It’s just the truth. People want their digital products to look good. Besides, if you’re being honest, even you care about it, don’t you?

Despite what many say, developing good craft takes many years. It’s also not beneath you: it’s a very technical skill that requires a lot of work to acquire — more than you are likely currently putting in. Instead of deriding it as work of simpleminded designers driven only by likes on Dribbble, product designers should accept that our customers do care about aesthetics in their products and just give the market what it wants. Besides, visual design is a skill that is admirable, and one could learn a lot from it if one approaches it with some humility, instead of writing it off!

But developing this skill, as stated, is hard. So, like all hard things, you should work on it every day. In a previous opinion piece, I talk more about it:

A great way to [acquire good visuals] is to exactly (and I mean exactly) reproduce everything you find beautiful, visually. Did you find a beautiful page in a book on Pinterest? Open an editor and reproduce it, or some part of it. Found a pretty app with some nice button and heading styles? Reproduce that entire screen. Reproduce it as many times as you need to get it perfect.
What you are doing here is developing your taste for what looks beautiful, and your skills around how to make beautiful things. It is a cognitive ability, in my opinion, but it is a very abstract one, and takes a lot of time. It is doable, however, but it can take some years. Being that this is a somewhat painful process that is hard to rush, people who are willing to endure this by way of sincere interest in visual design are the best match for acquiring this skillset. As such, the key to this skillset is sincere interest, tolerance, and willpower.

How to speedrun building a product design career in 90 days — for free

Don’t redesign coffee shop websites or clone Headspace. Make a product — a plausible one.

medium.com

Don’t be generic. You don’t need that hero image. You don’t need that illustration of a cityscape for decorative purposes (especially if you didn’t make it yourself). Advertise your work, not someone else’s. So make all your own visual assets.

Try risky things in your portfolio — it’s yours! Think of it like an “artist’s portfolio.” Show that artistry. Post visual attempts on Dribbble, even if you don’t use them in the end. Melt your text. Use strange color combinations. Make some text absurdly big, and some absurdly small. Scroll vertically. Make things rotate for no other reason other than it looks good. Try strange, fractional layouts. You don’t need to make all things black on white backgrounds. Try light pinks on green backgrounds, or the inverse. Try strange, melting gradients. Treat your imagery. Cut things out and make collages.

Just try anything. And try extremely often. In “You aren’t a UX designer unless you can design,” Lowell Stevens writes:

Are you brand new to the industry? You want to be a UX designer? Start by designing posters. I’m serious. Get an Adobe subscription … Make some movie posters for your favorite movies. Draw some pictures. Turn your favorite TV show into an icon series. … Once you’ve done that, start designing some consequential shit. Something useful.

He continues:

I had to hire a junior product designer a few months ago and every portfolio gave me enough website landing pages to print out and hang myself with. News flash: you’re not a fan of “simple, clean, minimal design,” you’re terrified of designing anything with more than 6 elements.

What’s a “serious” case study?

By “serious case studies,” I mean you need plausible case studies. Those prompts you got in your program about making a snack delivery service for your favorite brand of snacks, or a food delivery app for your favorite restaurant: these are not plausible. We already have a food delivery app: it’s called Uber Eats. You don’t need to revisit that. So, for example, these are prompts from one of those programs:

Design a game preview app for an arcade.

You and I both know that no one will ever need or want this.

Design a food delivery app for a bakery.

Uber Eats.

Design a delivery tracking app for a sushi restaurant.

Uber Eats.

Design a flower catalogue app for a florist.

Squarespace.

Design an order tracking app for a trendy florist.

Shopify.

Design a menu and payment app for a beachside snack shop.

Physical menu & Square.

Do not use these. These are easily solved with already available, off the shelf solutions. Try something realistic. You can add a feature into an existing product (why can’t I make recurrent event invites in Discord? Why can’t people easily add the events to their calendars when they express interest in the event? Can it post the event to a channel for me?). Or you can improve the navigation of a certain, famous social media app.

Or you can also go big: could LinkedIn have a mentor and mentee matching service in their product? What would that be like? How would the business benefit (increased engagement on the platform? Could paywall some features in this experience, driving up subscription revenue and retention?)? Would this generate an additional revenue stream somehow?

Regardless of your choice (I have a few suggested prompts in an earlier linked opinion piece of mine, here for your convenience), make sure it’s realistic. By this, I mean that it passes the “reasonable person test,” as I mentioned earlier. Ask yourself, or others:

Would I use that feature or product? Would anyone? And I mean this really.
Does it make sense to you? Can you explain it and its fundamental value proposition? Why would someone want to use this software?

If you feel that the software you’re proposing is plausible, makes sense, and seems reasonable, then that’s your opportunity to design out the core flow. You don’t need to build out every single feature or facet of this software, just focus on the core value prop. To continue with the example of the LinkedIn mentor and mentee matching experience, you could build out the mentee experience of finding a mentor. You can do the same for the mentors, and show the mentor’s experience with managing all their mentees in some focused view. You can include a few nice-to-haves, if you want, or you can just verbally mention them. The important thing is that:

This piece of software has a reason to exist beyond “I thought of this as an excuse so I could make some screens.” It must be plausible. It should be that, in your sincere estimation, there is real demand for this in some capacity,
Your solution makes sense for the business. For example: LinkedIn, as I understand, makes most of its money through subscriptions (something like 70% of its revenue). So, if you paywalled some facets of the mentoring experience, and there was demand for those features, then you could be adding value to the business. Likewise, you could be driving engagement on this platform, meaning that users who take part in this mentoring experience might be logging on to LinkedIn more frequently, posting, DMing, liking, sharing, which means that, at scale, more people get value from this product (due to socials having network effects).

Remember, what you make, you’re going to be showing to potential customers. If you don’t think a piece of software is convincing — that it has no compelling reason to exist other than an excuse to make screens in Figma — the chances are high that they will have those exact same thoughts, but will simply be too polite to point it out.

Ask yourself: would you watch a less beautiful and less interesting clone of your favorite movie? Would you play a less beautiful and less interesting clone of your favorite game? Then don’t make clones of other software in your portfolio, either, because your interviewers will be super bored, just as you would. Make your own software. Make things that have a reason to exist. You can go as big as you want here — from a simple improvement (recurring events in Discord; receipt scanning in Venmo after dinner that automatically calculates how much everyone should pay; etc.) to a whole new vertical in a business (mentoring experience in LinkedIn; organ donation matching service in 23andme; etc.). It is your choice, your “business,” and your vision.

Going further

If you don’t think anyone would use the software you’re proposing, don’t propose it. Your future customers are interested in real, complex, interesting thoughts — the kind that come about when you propose things that have real, practical use. Additionally, whatever you make, try to make it look presentable and professional — or better: beautiful and different. People care about excellence in all things.

Give your future customers a reason to hire you. Give them a reason to believe you bring excellence in all things — craft and cognitive ability. I understand that, in your case studies, you’re told to include:

“The problem statement,”
A section about process, with images of “double diamonds,” with claims that you work like that, including words like “discover,” “define,” “test,” “iterate,” “deliver,” strewn about,
A section with a “persona,”
A section about “competitive analysis,”
A section with a “site map,”
A section with images of stickies and “low fi wireframes,”
A section with “a design system,” which includes some type at different sizes, a few color blocks, some buttons,
And a section with “takeaways” or “learnings.”

I understand that bootcamps, university programs, Medium posts, YouTube videos, and so on all assert that you need to do this. But this is all optional.

For my part, in almost a decade that I’ve been working as a designer, I’ve never made a persona. I’ve never made a “site map.” I’ve never made “low fi wireframes.” I still do not know exactly how to “double diamond” in my workflow. I don’t exactly know if I understand what “design thinking” is. And design systems are not color blocks or headings at a different sizes and, anyway, in your solo work, you will not need one. Design systems are components with lots of complex variations, and making them well is a question of being very practical and economical, and it requires real technical experience to keep performance from suffering at scale. This isn’t something that makes sense to plug in as a little 600x600 graphic of at the end of a case study.

I don’t know how else to say this

Just build software you think makes sense. All any of us are doing is writing software with the purpose of it being a viable product to build a viable business on. This is not a science, nor is it a formula you can plug values into. If businesses and great products were possible to build via plug-and-play formulas taken from bootcamps (a “design process”), literally everyone would have made successful businesses by now. But you and I both know this is not the case.

Propose something you think is reasonable. Then explain your proposed software in a way that you think a loved one would understand (e.g., explain the product, explain the business, explain your feature or addition or improvement, show a screen recording of you using your proposed design, etc.). That’s your case study.

Include only what is needed to clearly explain what the software is. Do not include things people tell you to include, with sections you feel you ought to have. Include what you sincerely think is necessary in order to explain or build it. Explain how you think you could prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that this product or feature would be useful to users (analytics endpoints that watch for return behavior; an increase in subscriptions in users exposed to your new product; an increase in DMs in your target users; etc.).

Imagine that you are doing what business owners do often: going before investors to try and make a case for why investors should fork over their hard earned money and take a risk on this new software business. Prove to your readers and interviewers why this product you are proposing should exist. Make it clear and unequivocal. If someone isn’t convinced, use your natural, human capacity for reason to determine what holes you’d need to plug in your reasoning in order to convince them. If there is a fundamental hole in the product, build a new case study. And make it look professional. None of this requires a formula for you to plug stuff into (✅ problem statement; ✅ persona; ✅ Google Forms survey; etc.).

The best part about this is that it won’t cost you $10,000 USD, and you’re not following a rubric you bought online: you’re doing what you sincerely believe to be true. Nothing can replace sound judgment and reasoning and, as luck would have it, it’s something you are born with — a superpower! It’s yours. Use it freely, and with aplomb.

A few other heterodox opinions to leave you with

I understand that breaking the programming sold by these programs can be hard. For this reason, I would invite you to consider a selection of heterodox views expressed below. You don’t have to agree, but just consider that there are experienced designers in the industry who hold these beliefs — and they have their reasons. If you disagree, totally fair. But, if you were looking for permission from the universe to allow yourself to agree, consider this that very thing.

From Juan Ramirez, who writes:

Designing wireframes is a waste of time…putting together a wireframe took me longer than putting together a high-fidelity design…

And who also wrote:

Intuition is the most underrated Product Design skill that nobody is talking about. And it might be the most important one.
This might sound contrarian, especially when everything you learn about Product Design highlights the importance of collecting data and getting a signal on the validity of a design…If you think about it, it would be almost impossible to design anything if you had to validate every small design decision you take against some piece of data.

From Kevin Rapp, who writes:

Being data-driven is a fun buzzword…Human intuition, thoughtful analysis, and creative problem solving should drive your strategy, not data.

From Dominic Francis, who writes:

I’m VERY anti design thinking. I don’t really know what it is even though I’ve been working in the UX Research and Design space for over a decade…All too often it’s only something fanciful of Post It Notes on the walls, or new ideas that are either not new or just plain not feasible…There really does need to be more of a focus on good products, and not artsy terms such as Design Thinking or Business Design.

From Bob Baxley, in an interview with Felix Lee, who remarked:

So I’m a big believer in taste over data and over user research…All these tools that you think you have to have, none of that stuff exists at Apple.

Or a famous adage, usually said by economists:

Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted

Take from these what you will. Above all, what I hope you’ll take away is that you have a natural capacity for individual thought — and you have every right and inclination to use it as you see fit. Don’t put a formula in the driver’s seat of your future. Start over if you want to. Use your own mind if you want to. The probability is high that this is also the right decision, but it should be one you make for yourself — if you want to.

Finally, I wanted to mention that you are not alone, and I do want to help. If you have questions concerning anything I’ve said, or want a sounding board for a product or feature you want to build, or simply disagree, let me know, as I’d sincerely love to hear it! I can be found on LinkedIn, feel free to reach out. If you are so inclined, you’re also welcome to book me on ADPList. I’m happy to help in any way I can. I sincerely wish you all the best of luck.

Index of links

I’ve included many links throughout this article, so I’ll itemize them here, if that’s helpful.

University design programs

(Most product designers don’t come from design and fine arts backgrounds, so you might be interested in knowing that these are some very famous art schools that I’m disagreeing with here.)

California College of Art’s product design program,
MICA’s product design program,
A product design program from RISD’s Continuing Education program,
Academy of Art’s product design program,
Pratt’s product design program for graduate students,
SVA’s product design program,
SCAD’s product design program.