My entire portfolio is a Figma prototype

A few weeks after I started at Vercel, Jay had me on Sneak Peek to show the portfolio presentation I gave when I interviewed there. It isn't a website or a slide deck. It's a Figma prototype, with a nav I can reuse, a slide template, and four topics that each run down the canvas, because that's just how I think about prototypes, and all my design work was already in Figma anyway (2:35). I can click a button to show something, fade to the next thing or open a modal, and move things around a lot faster than I could in slides (3:22).

There aren't any words on the screen. Every time I've presented in the past I've wandered off the plan, so I stopped writing notes I'm going to ignore and put up visual cues instead, and I pick up the thread from there (5:04). I didn't rehearse it to a timer either. I'd given a version of it to Linear a little while before, so I cut it from about 50 minutes to 40 to leave time at the end, and that was about it (8:19).

What I showed

It opened with my family (5:33). When I was hiring at Asurion I wanted to know who someone was. Not whether we had the same hobbies, but whether I could work with them and understand what motivates them. So I showed my wife and two boys, and a few things I'm into, like baseball, vinyl, barbecue, e-bikes and the deck I built in our backyard, and some of those turned into conversations later on.

Then a side project (10:25). I think a side project is the best way to see how someone works when there's no company, road map or politics around them, so if you have one, show it. Mine was Ditherface, which actually came out of company work: I drew the Basedash team for our about page, people started asking for their own, and when we pivoted I made one for everyone who gave me an hour for a user interview (12:06). Every one is rectangles I drew in Figma, and it's how I met a lot of designers I really like.

Basedash was the main part (15:05), but five years at a company isn't one project, so it was more about who I was there and how I made decisions: the history, the flowchart I made to pitch the pivot, the first Framer prototypes for charts, all the card variants I had to support, and the explorations that never made it in. I used motion wherever I could, because when I post work, the work that moves gets about ten times as many people interested as a static screen, and motion makes something feel real (15:39). I showed a screenshot of my Figma canvas instead of opening the file, because five years of Figma files is chaos and I needed to control where the presentation went (17:18). And then I made a point of showing the real app and saying "this is not Figma", because what makes it into production is the part where you're working with developers (18:57).

The last section was details that didn't fit anywhere else (20:53): the Unicorn Studio loaders in the product, the icons I drew on a 15 pixel grid, a glitchy character shimmer for when the AI is loading, the hundreds of integration logos I redrew because the ones we had were terrible, the website, and Macindash (22:21).

How I got the job

I didn't spray and pray (22:47). I knew I wanted technical B2B products and teams that are really design-led. I'd applied to Linear once and heard nothing, so when Karri Saarinen tweeted that they were hiring a principal designer I DM'd him, and the next day he sent me his calendar (23:47). Linear passed, and I think for the right reasons. They were looking for management experience I don't have (27:38). I was bummed for a little bit, but getting that far with a design team I respect was a huge confidence boost, and I decided it wasn't going to be a low spot.

So I asked myself what the boldest thing I could do was, and DM'd Soleio, who I'd never talked to (28:21). I'd seen someone say they'd reached out to him and had an interview the next week, so I quoted that. We talked on Zoom while I sat on a park bench at a campground in South Dakota, and he introduced me to Vercel (32:09). I never applied for the job.

Jay asked about a few other things. I don't think cover letters matter (24:52). I've never met a designer who got a job because of one. It's always someone they knew or someone who vouched for them, because you're not only up against a thousand other applications, you're up against everyone who knows somebody inside. I also didn't negotiate my salary (36:22). The offer was in the range I expected, and three weeks of negotiating is three weeks of not getting paid. I'd rather earn more by doing good work once I'm there. I'd still tell junior designers to negotiate, though, and I've pushed hard on pay before, for myself and for other people.

Share your work with people who use it

My longest answer was about sharing your work (43:12). The feedback that made me better early on came from users, not other designers. At my first tech job our users were contact center employees at big banks, and I wasn't allowed to talk to them, so I sat in a mall with an iPad and a sign offering five bucks of Starbucks to anyone who'd test my scheduling app (46:31). After each person I'd fix whatever tripped them up in Principle before the next one sat down. I got kicked out of that mall four times. When a 68-year-old grandma could move her shift from Tuesday to Thursday on her own, I knew I was onto something (47:59).

And please don't put a made-up dashboard in your portfolio (50:15). Dashboards are one of the hardest things to design, because you have to understand the whole product, what people need to measure and how the data gets to the screen, and anyone who's built one can tell a restyled Figma template right away.