Hey and welcome back to a new week!

I’m back from vacation 🌴 and have lots of nice new things planned so watch this space.

This week we are starting easy so no portfolio showcase this week but it’ll be back again next week - promise!

In this issue:

Design Skills Aren’t Enough If You Can’t Work With People: How to build and show evidence that you can collaborate, handle constraints, and make good work with other people.

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Open almost any junior product design job description and sooner or later you will hit some version of this:

“Works well cross-functionally.”

Or:

“Collaborates with product managers and engineers.”

And if most of your portfolio consists of student projects and things you designed alone, that can be a frustrating requirement.

How are you supposed to prove that you work well with engineers, PMs, stakeholders, researchers, or other designers when nobody has given you a product design job yet?

You should not fake it.

But you also should not underestimate how valuable collaboration is, or how many opportunities you have to build evidence of it before your first full-time role.

Because product design rarely happens alone.

You will work with engineers who know why your preferred solution will take three weeks longer to build. PMs who understand a business constraint you have not seen yet. Stakeholders with priorities that compete with yours. Other designers who challenge a direction you were convinced about yesterday.

Being able to make good work with those people matters.

And your portfolio can show that.

When a company says it wants a collaborative designer, I do not think they are counting how many meetings you have attended.

They want signals that you can work through a problem with other people.

Can you explain your thinking without becoming defensive?

Can you listen when an engineer tells you something will be painful to build?

Can you understand why a PM is pushing for something that may not be your preferred UX?

Can you ask a useful question when a stakeholder gives vague feedback?

Can you disagree, make a tradeoff, and keep the work moving?

Those situations are part of product design.

Sometimes an engineer will spot an edge case you missed.

Sometimes customer support knows more about a broken workflow than anyone in the design team.

Sometimes a stakeholder request that initially sounds annoying exposes a business problem you did not understand.

You do not need to agree with everyone.

You need to be able to work with them.

Here is where portfolios sometimes go wrong.

Someone worked on a team project, so suddenly their entire case study becomes:

By the end, I have no idea what you did.

Your portfolio is there to help someone evaluate you.

Collaboration does not change that.

You can describe a shared project while being very clear about your contribution:

Those examples give other people credit while still telling me what you contributed.

You do not need to turn everything into “I” either. Some decisions belong to the team. Say that when they do.

What matters is precision.

Hiring teams should come away understanding what you owned, where other people influenced the work, and how you worked together.

That gives them much more information than a case study where everyone else mysteriously disappears.

This is common.

You are studying design. You completed a bootcamp. You are changing careers. You built a couple of portfolio projects from scratch.

Nobody expects you to invent an engineering team that was never there.

A strong solo project still has plenty of value. It can show craft, product thinking, initiative, research, writing, prototyping, interaction design, or whatever else you want the project to prove.

I like seeing a mix though.

Maybe you have one or two polished projects you executed alone, alongside an internship project, hackathon, client project, or something you built with other people.

That mix gives each project a different job in your portfolio.

Your solo project can show how far you can push something when you have control over the direction.

Your collaborative work can show what happens when your ideas meet constraints, feedback, technical limitations, conflicting priorities, and other humans.

You learn different things from each.

I wrote recently about making the most of internships and client work, and collaboration is a huge part of why those experiences can become such useful portfolio material.

Even a short internship can give you stories you cannot manufacture convincingly inside a solo concept project.

Maybe engineering pushed back on your first solution.

Maybe your manager gave you feedback that changed the direction.

Maybe a PM narrowed the problem.

Maybe someone from support showed you that customers were struggling with something nobody had considered.

Write those things down.

When you eventually build the case study, you have much richer evidence than “I created wireframes and then high-fidelity screens.”

You can explain what changed once other perspectives entered the work.

Internships are not available to everyone at exactly the moment they need them.

Hackathons often are.

And I think they are underrated as a way for junior designers to experience collaborative product work.

You might get grouped with developers, designers, students from another discipline, founders, or people who have completely different skills from yours.

Suddenly you cannot spend three weeks polishing a flow.

Someone needs to build it.

Someone needs to decide what the idea even is.

Someone needs to cut half the scope.

Someone needs to pitch it.

You may spend a weekend making something rougher than your normal portfolio project and learn far more about collaboration from it.

Even working with other designers helps. You still have to explain your decisions, divide ownership, critique each other’s work, compromise, and figure out how separate pieces become one product.

That experience counts.

You can create some of these opportunities yourself too.

If you are planning another portfolio project, consider finding someone to build it with.

Maybe you know a developer who wants a side project.

Maybe another student is stronger on research or business thinking.

Maybe someone has an idea they have wanted to build for months and needs a designer.

Tooling has made this much easier as well. We recently covered how designers can take a Figma design into a working prototype with AI coding tools, and those same tools make small side projects far more feasible than they were a few years ago.

You could take that one step further and build with someone else.

Give yourselves a small problem. Decide who owns what. Work through the product decisions together. Ship something.

You do not need to create a startup.

You need the experience of having your design decisions meet another person’s constraints and ideas.

Collaboration evidence also does not need to come exclusively from design.

If you worked in customer support, marketing, sales, hospitality, operations, education, events, retail, or plenty of other fields before moving into design, you have probably spent years working with people who wanted different things from you.

Think about those situations.

Did you explain complicated information to customers?

Work with several teams to solve a problem?

Handle competing priorities?

Push back on a request?

Coordinate people around a deadline?

Adapt because someone else had information you were missing?

Those are useful stories.

They do not prove that you have experience collaborating with a software engineer on a product team. Do not claim that they do.

But they can prove that you know how to listen, communicate, navigate disagreements, and work with people.

For an early-career designer, that matters.

Once you do get access to engineers, PMs, stakeholders, support teams, researchers, or anyone else around product development, use it.

Ask engineers what makes a design painful to implement.

Ask PMs how they decide what gets built first.

Ask support teams which workflows create the same complaint again and again.

Ask stakeholders what they care about when they review design work.

You start seeing your own work differently.

A flow can look beautiful in Figma and be expensive to build.

A small interaction can remove a pile of edge cases.

A product decision that looks like a UX compromise can make sense once you understand the business behind it.

Learning to see those relationships makes you a stronger product designer.

And eventually, those are the stories you want showing up in your portfolio too.

Not a vague sentence saying you “collaborated cross-functionally.”

Show me where another person changed your thinking.

Show me where you changed theirs.

Show me what you contributed.

That tells me far more about what working with you might feel like.

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That’s it for this week—thanks so much for the support! ♥️

Do you want your own portfolio reviewed in-depth with a 30-minute advice-packed video portfolio review? Look no more. I do offer these as an async service you can book directly with me here.

Keep kicking doors open and see you next week!
- Florian