Jenny Wen

Jenny Wen

Product Designer at Figma

Product Designer at Figma. Previously Dropbox Paper, Square, Shopify, and Coursera. UWaterloo alumnus.

3 action items

Structure your portfolio to best communicate your skillsets

    • Approach the design of your portfolio like a design problem. Your user is a hiring manager or recruiter and you need to convey who you are and what you'd bring to the team as effectively as possible. You know they're constrained by time and are trying to get high, confident signal on who you are in a sea of other portfolios.

    • Select work you're proud of

      Curate, curate, curate. It's more impactful to highlight fewer projects that you're proud of, rather than a ton of projects that aren't your best work. Bias towards sharing work that's recent, had strong results, and showcases what your strengths are as a designer.... See more

    • Highlight key decisions

      Portfolios often just showcase process for the sake of process. Don't just show that you followed a linear or typical process. Projects are rarely linear and they hardly follow a standard process. What were the unique considerations you had to make for this project? How did your process accommodate those things? What were the hardest decisions to make and how did you make them reasonably?... See more

    • Make it easy to scan

      Hiring managers don't have a ton of time to spend on each and every portfolio. If they're scrolling quickly through a case study of a project, they should be able to pick up within a few seconds, the gist of the project and what your contributions were. Choose and curate effective visuals, use effective hierarchy and titles to bring main parts of the process to the forefront.... See more