Hey and welcome back to a new week!

Feedback can be one of the most useful parts of a design job search. It can also leave you wondering what to change when everyone seems to want something different.

This week, I am looking at two ways to make sense of that advice—and how AI can help you spot patterns without making the decisions for you.

And small PSA: no portfolio showcase this week due to a little mishap on my end reviewing the wrong version of a portfolio 🙃 we will be back with the right one next week.

In this issue:

Everyone Has Feedback on Your Portfolio. What Should You Change? How to collect advice, find patterns, and choose your next move.

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Ask enough people for feedback on your portfolio and eventually someone will tell you to change something another person specifically liked.

A designer wants more detail. A recruiter wants you to get to the point faster. A hiring manager says the work looks polished but wants to understand more of your thinking. Someone else thinks you already explain too much.

It can feel as though every conversation creates another version of the portfolio you are supposed to have. But before talking about how to handle that, I want to be clear about something: feedback is incredibly useful, and you should actively look for it.

You need other people to see things you have stopped noticing. You need to understand where your work is unclear, what it fails to demonstrate, and how it comes across to the people you want to work with. The answer to conflicting advice is to get better at using it.

Ask designers to review your work. Ask people familiar with the roles you want. And when you are rejected send a short email or message asking for feedback.

I would make the question specific:

“Thanks again for the conversations. If you’re able to share any feedback, what did the candidates who progressed demonstrate that I didn’t show clearly enough? Was there a particular skill or area of experience missing on my side?”

You are asking about the difference that mattered in that decision, rather than inviting a generic suggestion to keep improving your portfolio. You do not need information about another candidate personally. You want to understand the criteria and where your evidence fell short.

Some companies will not respond. Some will only give a vague answer. That is frustrating, but it is still worth asking. A useful answer after a case-study presentation or final interview can tell you something you would struggle to learn from another general portfolio review.

Treat the answer as a perspective on that hiring decision. It may reveal a real gap. It may also reflect a very specific need, or only part of the reasoning behind the outcome.

A recruiter might be trying to establish quickly whether your experience matches the role. A designer reviewing your portfolio might notice hierarchy, interaction details, and how you explain decisions. A hiring manager might be thinking about the work their team needs someone to take on next month.

Those perspectives overlap, but they are not identical. People also have preferences shaped by their own careers, teams, and experiences. Someone who has mostly hired into large organisations may give different advice from someone building an early-stage startup team.

Just because a senior person says something confidently does not make it a universal truth. Their experience makes the feedback worth considering. It does not remove the need to understand where it comes from.

Even seemingly contradictory advice can make sense in context. Your homepage may need to get to the point faster while your main case study needs more explanation of one important decision. Before choosing which person is right, check whether they were even reacting to the same thing.

I think there are two useful ways to handle all of this.

Find someone relevant to your direction and work with them over time. Ideally, that is an experienced designer or someone in a coaching capacity who understands the kind of career you want to build.

This is essentially a mentor. Instead of starting from zero with a new reviewer every time, you build a relationship with someone who knows your work, what you have already tried, and where you are trying to go.

When other feedback comes in, bring it to them. A hiring manager wanted more product thinking. A reviewer suggested cutting half your case study. Another designer said you need a stronger flagship project. Which of those observations fits what your mentor has seen? Which deserves attention now?

The value is continuity. Someone can help you interpret new advice against a bigger picture, rather than letting the most recent conversation determine your next month of work.

Choose that person carefully. Their experience should be relevant to your goals, and they should be able to explain their reasoning. Trust should grow from useful guidance over time; you still get to question it.

Ongoing mentoring or coaching may cost money. You can sometimes find that relationship through a manager, community, or generous experienced peer, but regular access is not available to everyone. The second approach is probably more feasible for many people.

Give every source a fair place in the collection, without treating any one person as the final authority. Instead of changing your portfolio after each conversation, collect the feedback and look for patterns.

One person thinks your projects lack depth. Write it down. Several people hiring for similar roles struggle to understand your decisions. Now you have something worth investigating.

For subjective advice, I would avoid making a substantial change based on one comment alone. A broken link is different: you can verify it and fix it immediately. You do not need three reviewers to confirm that your contact button goes nowhere.

Keep the collection somewhere you will actually maintain: Notion, a spreadsheet, a small custom app, or another tool you like. Ideally, use something you can make available to an AI assistant, even if that simply means exporting the relevant entries. An MCP would be great though as it can interact with the data better that way. Notion is definitely a good starting point here.

For each piece of feedback, save:

That last detail matters. If you have already addressed something, you do not want old feedback repeatedly telling you the current version is broken.

Then let AI help with the sorting. Ask it to group similar observations, distinguish repeated concerns from isolated preferences, and surface contradictions. Ask it to attach each proposed pattern to the original comments and show which roles and portfolio versions it applies to.

Keep names and unnecessary personal details out of what you share, and respect anything confidential. You need enough context to understand the feedback, not a dossier on every interviewer.

AI can make the collection much easier to inspect. It can also flatten different comments into one neat but misleading conclusion. Read the underlying feedback before accepting its summary. Five people repeating a popular portfolio rule are not automatically five independent reasons to follow it.

Imagine you keep applying to teams building complex workplace software. Several hiring managers like your visual work but say they cannot see enough evidence that you can design a workflow involving different users, permissions, and competing needs.

That is more useful than a vague instruction to show “more business thinking.” You can investigate what is missing. But it still does not tell you automatically what to do next.

Maybe you have done that work and barely show it. Your internship project involved an approval flow, but your case study concentrates on the final screens. You could explain who needed to approve what, where the process became difficult, and why you chose that particular solution.

You may not have access to post-launch metrics anymore. Ask your former manager what you are allowed to share. If the numbers are unavailable, explain the decisions, constraints, and any evidence you do have. Do not fill the gap with an invented improvement percentage.

Maybe the skill itself is missing. Your projects never went beyond one person completing a straightforward task. Rewriting the case study will only get you so far. You may need to extend a side project, work with other people, or create a focused exercise that makes you deal with that complexity. Be honest about what was simulated and what you actually learned.

Then there is another question: do you want to do this kind of work?

When you look past the company name and job title, do you find those workflows interesting? Do you want to understand how different teams operate, negotiate competing requirements, and make complicated processes easier to use?

If yes, great. The feedback has given you a clearer development direction. You now know what to learn and what your portfolio needs to demonstrate.

If that work consistently leaves you cold, perhaps you need to reconsider your targets. You might be more interested in consumer interactions, expressive websites, or another area altogether. B2B and consumer work both contain plenty of variety, so investigate the actual work rather than deciding from the category alone.

Changing direction will probably reveal different gaps. You may need stronger motion skills, better visual craft, or deeper interaction work. That is fine. You are choosing a set of skills you want to develop, with a clearer reason for developing them.

One rejection is a weak basis for changing your career direction. A recurring mismatch between what employers need and what you actually want to do deserves a closer look.

Whether you work with a mentor or build your own collection, keep asking for feedback. The more useful perspectives you have, the less one person's opinion needs to dominate your next move.

But gathering advice is only part of the work. You still have to decide whether a pattern points to something missing from your portfolio, something you need to learn, or a mismatch in the roles you are pursuing.

A mentor can help you think that through. AI can help you see the material more clearly. Neither can decide what kind of designer you want to become.

That part needs to stay with you.

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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