We kicked off our UX Tree Portfolio Tune-Up webinar with a simple problem we keep seeing in UX hiring. Most designers do good work, sometimes great work, but their portfolio does not make that obvious. Instead of feeling clear and confident, it feels heavy, crowded, and hard to read.
The result is the same every time – strong designers get overlooked, not because of their ability, but because of how they present it.

In this session, we worked through a real example from Claire Philipp, one of our UX Tree mentees. Her work was not the issue. In fact, it was strong. The problem was how it was packaged. Too many projects, too much content, and no clear story made it difficult to understand what mattered most. When a hiring manager opens a portfolio like that, they do not slow down to figure it out. They move on.

So Claire did something uncomfortable but necessary. She removed things and cut the portfolio down instead of adding to it. She chose one case study and made it the centre of the entire experience, rebuilt the structure so the story became easier to follow, from context to thinking to outcome. The goal was not to impress people with visuals, but to help them quickly understand how Claire thinks and how she solves problems.

One of the strongest insights from the session is this: hiring managers do not study portfolios. They scan them.
You have seconds, not minutes. If your value is not obvious immediately, it gets lost.
This is why clarity is more powerful than quantity, and why most portfolios fail quietly even when the work is strong.

We also spoke about how AI is changing everything.
It is now very easy to generate clean case studies, polished layouts, and well-written project descriptions. The problem is that this creates sameness. When everyone uses similar tools in similar ways, portfolios start to look interchangeable.
In that world, the thing that stands out is not polish, but perspective. What you choose to show, how you explain your thinking, and what you decide to leave out matters more than ever.

Another theme that came up was timing.
Many designers wait too long before sharing their portfolio because they want it to be perfect. That delay slows down progress. A portfolio works better when it is treated as something alive. You publish, you test, you learn, and you improve. It does not need to be finished to be useful.

At its core, this session reinforced a simple idea.
A portfolio is not an archive of work. It is a tool for positioning. It should make your value easy to understand, not hard to decode. The designers who understand this stop trying to show everything and start focusing on what actually helps them get hired.

You can watch the full session recording here:
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You can listen to the Notebook LM podcast summary here, which breaks down the key ideas from Claire and Riccardo in a more conversational format:
[Insert Notebook LM link]

If this resonated with you and you are working on your own portfolio, the Portfolio Tune-Up course goes deeper into this process. It shows you how to audit your own work, decide what to cut, and rebuild your portfolio so it communicates your value clearly.