Making a fantastic PM Portfolio

With high competition in the market and flocks of aspiring Product managers, Portfolios have become a golden ticket to land and crack product management job roles. Product management is often a generalist role, with a wide variety of skills needed, which could be hard to show on a single page resume. Let’s learn more about making your own portfolio.

Why do you need a product portfolio?

Imagine being a recruiter, having to scan through 100’s resumes. What would you look for? Someone presenting the right skill set, right? These skills would be Analytics, Design, Product sense, Tech, etc. But how do you know that those 2 lines of experience section really tell about the candidate? That’s where portfolios are helpful.

Product portfolios help portray your skillset and domain knowledge to the recruiter. Not only does this help you portray that very skillset, but they also give you an edge, especially if you have a case study solution related to the company you are applying for. That being said, portfolios also show the recruiter that you’ve put effort into learning and getting to where you are. This shows that you are proactive and ready to put in extra effort from the very start itself.

Lastly, experience matters in the Product role. But as we know many of us either lack the product-oriented experience or have no experience at all. Portfolios help you signal for aptitude. They bring out some of the very needed skills like Product sense, design, and tech knowledge. In short, a product portfolio will help in the following ways:

- To separate you from the crowd

- Help portray your domain knowledge and skill set

- Will show that you are someone who is ready to put in the extra effort

What should your portfolio portray?

A Product portfolio should essentially portray all the major skills that are needed for a product managerial role. These skills are:

- Product Sense:  Knowledge about how products work, what is the business model, and a deeper sense of the Whys & Whats of the product/feature

- Technical Sense - This contains knowledge of APIs, Webhooks, and also a grip on system design and how the overall tech works behind a product/feature. Obviously, you don’t need to code, but you should be able to explain what you want to the devs, and the same thing you need to show in your portfolio

- Design Sense: This includes knowledge of wireframes and low and high-fidelity mockups. To be able to showcase design sense properly, you also need to know some basic tools like Figma, Balsamiq, etc.

- Analytics Sense: Now the analytics part is often misunderstood by knowledge of tools like Mixpanel or Google Analytics. In reality, analytics, means ability to define metrics and set up experimentation constructs.

In combination with the aforementioned 4 categories you need to show market research and growth strategy mindset.

Diving A Bit Deeper

Your portfolio will contain 3 major materials

- Your teardowns and case studies to show your product sense

- Your knowledge base to show communication skills

- And your resume to show your product exposure.

Resume and Communication skills could be a different blog altogether. For today let’s dive deeper into case studies or teardowns.

Teardowns & Case Studies

Case studies, teardowns, and product decks are vital to portray your problem solving aptitude that’s relevant for product roles.

A good portfolio should have around 4 to 6 decks, comprising various domains like EdTech, FinTech, SaaS, etc. If you are someone who is targeting a specific industry then feel free to have decks relevant to that industry itself.

Another point to add here is it’s always great to add some fictional PRDs i.e. product requirement documents to your portfolio. They help you show the recruiter that not only you can think well, but at the same time you have good structured documentation skills.

An example for writing a PRD could be “Buying journey for 4-wheeler vehicle insurance” or “Reels feature for Instagram”. For case studies, the flow majorly goes in the following manner:

• - Market Research
• - Intent
• - Problem Description
• - User Persona and Target Audience
• - Solutioning
• - Design & Mockup
• - Future Advancements
  

A case study could be of 3 types :

1. Problem Solution

Here you pick a problem, for example, “Netflix is struggling with low retention rate for the last 3 months”, and then with all the factors including product, design, and analytics you fictionally solve the issue.  

2. Optimisation

In these kinds of teardowns, instead of picking a problem, we pick a product instead and try to improve it. Now there are definitely constraints on what and why to improve. Generally, if your goal is to make the deck for the portfolio, you can pick up some general constraints to improvise the product.
These constraints could be in terms of Demography, Target audience, sectional features of the product, or growth trajectory of the product.

3. Business Model Breakdown

Here, you pick a product and basically tear it down end-to-end. You describe the tech stack in the back, the operational model, the business model, the past and future vision of the product. Now let me show you how to do a sample case study. Let’s say we pick a product, let it be a meditation app and we aim to improve for a target audience-based constraint. This is an optimization type of case study.

For the scope of this blog, let’s say that the constraint is “Improving retention for Gen-Z audience”.

The first step for you would be to break down the problem. It could be that Gen-Z feels monotonous, there could be a lack of motivation, and the third problem could be boredom while using the app. Here you can describe the persona, the user habits, and their challenges.

After describing the problem, you validate it with data. It could be surveys, user interviews, Playstore reviews, etc. Now you focus on the intent, why to solve this problem, and why to solve it now? What business proposition do you have to focus on this problem? Now you’ll look at the market size, and the competitors and do the market research.

After the first phase which was the problem description comes the solution part. Here we look at some possible solutions.

For our case, they could be

- Gamification

- Community

- Personalization

After we have a few solutions in our hands, we prioritise them as per the resources and other factors needed to build and ship the feature.

Once the prioritisation is over, we can focus on building mockups for the same. Some wireframes and UI designs can do the thing. You can use software like Figma to do this. Now you can choose to include system design mapping to showcase your technical exposure. After that, you define the success metrics and future advancements. And that's how you make one such case study. You can check out this Link to see a sample of my friend’s case deck. He is a PM at Meesho.

Places where you can make your portfolio

There are various methods of how you can make your portfolio.

You can try a simple format in Notion. There’s also Fueler, which is specifically a portfolio platform for generalist roles like Product management. You can even host your own website or can take inspiration from platforms like Behance. It does not matter where you make your portfolio as long as it is easily shareable and viewable.

So that does it for today! I hope this was helpful for you.