tl;dr Showcase your work with a free product portfolio website. Get started here.
If you’re a product manager, you’ve got stories to tell. Stories such as “We had a crazy deadline and we made some hard calls” or “It almost didn’t launch but I talked the CEO off of the ledge”.
You tell these stories in your interviews and the hiring panel goes “Wow! Tell me more!” and you fill them in on the gooey details.
Makes you wonder… why are these stories only uncovered in a live interview? How many opportunities have you missed out on by being judged solely on your resume?
Introducing: Product Manager Portfolios!
We (Nicole Mors and myself) have designed a portfolio template for sharing great product stories. You can use this template to create, personalize, and deploy your portfolio onto the internet for FREE.
Check out a live preview of the template portfolio here.
In the following sections we’ll review how to get your personal website up and running, give an overview of the features included, and advise on how to personalize your website and tell your best product stories.
Get started with copying and publishing the template
To host and personalize your own portfolio, you’ll need to have a GitHub account, be able to edit and build the webpages locally on your computer, and publish to the web with a Vercel hobby account. All steps in this process are totally free. See an example live portfolio (mine!) here.
Even if you have no coding experience, this template is lightweight enough we encourage you to give creating your own portfolio a go. Writing the content is always the hardest part anyway!
The structure of the portfolio
The portfolio is built to highlight you and the projects you’ve worked on and we’ve kept it dead simple for that purpose. Here are the pages included:
- Home Orient your reader to your portfolio with a brief introduction to yourself and links to your recently published projects. You can also include a headshot and a link to download your resume.
- About Tell the reader a bit more about yourself and path into product with a fun picture.
- Projects The projects you’ve worked. Each project will have its own page highlighting your role, project execution, challenges and achievements.
Writing product stories
For each product you’ve launched or initiative you’ve led, create a new project page to highlight the story behind your work. Each project page has the following sections (although you are free to modify as you see fit):
- Product A short description of the product created. Keep it simple so anyone can understand what it is that was built.
- My Role A list of the different hats you wore during the product creation lifecycle. Be descriptive in your responsibilities e.g. Solution Champion, Customer Discovery Lead, Champion to Leadership, Community Manager.
- Execution Details on the discovery, delivery, and launch phases of the product. This section should demonstrate to the reader skillset around driving product discovery, delivery, and launch initiatives.
- Challenges & Achievements A list of the different challenges you faced during execution as well as what was accomplished. Challenges are of particular interest to hiring managers as they can demonstrate critical product management skills such as perseverance, stakeholder management, and prioritization.
Personalizing your portfolio
Make the portfolio your own with social media links, choosing your own favicon 👣, creating a catchy portfolio preview (see below), uploading your resume, and including your headshot or other fun pictures. We have also included an external blog link in the top navigation (no point in rebuilding what’s already free and readily available e.g. medium.com). Details on how to personalize the portfolio can be found in the template README.
Build and Deploy
Here’s a quick walkthrough of the process end to end:
You can find the detailed steps in the repo’s README file including steps on how to deploy your project to Vercel. Vercel will automatically publish your repo to a FREE website hosted by Vercel (aka *.vercel.app). If you wish to host your portfolio on a bespoke URL (aka lisafeets.com), you can purchase a domain name through Vercel directly and publish your site there.
Happy portfolio building!
