Hey and welcome back to another week! 👋 

In this issue:

• How To Show Impact: I keep talking about it—time to show you how to do it with or without real world work in your portfolio.

• I’m Running Another Vibecode Workshop: The last one sold out super quickly and was amazing. I’m doing it again though! Scroll to learn more.

• Siddharth’s Portfolio: One of the most playful yet striking and well-working portfolios I’ve seen in a while

💻️ VIBECODE WITH ME

Learn How To Use Lovable To Create Amazing Prototypes And Apps From Scratch

I already ran this workshop in August—and it sold out in a couple of days. I also learned a lot running it once. Now I’m back with another round. Make sure to book this one and learn how to leverage AI, vibecoding and a builder mindset to stand out.

This is what you get:

• ​Build without code: Get hands-on with Lovable and turn your ideas into functional, interactive apps — without writing a single line of code.

• ​Boost your prototyping edge: Master the fastest way to validate ideas, impress stakeholders, and iterate at the speed of creativity.

• ​Premium tools to keep building: Every attendee gets 1 month Lovable Pro account with 100 credits to continue building after the workshop.

🤝 TODAY’S PARTNER

Your network is hiring. You just don’t know it yet.

Indy AI by Contra helps you find opportunities through your existing network. It connects to LinkedIn and X, then quietly surfaces warm opportunities. No cold outreach. No job boards. No feed fatigue. Just opportunities that find you.

Let work find you

How to Show Business Impact in Your Design Portfolio (Even With Fictional Projects) 📈

Design doesn’t live in a vacuum. Great visual polish or clever UX matter, but if your work can’t be tied back to business outcomes, you often won’t get the credit. And when you’re just starting out, that can be the difference between a portfolio that blends in and one that stands out.

This was something I already understood early in my career — my background as a PM meant I was used to thinking about metrics, growth, and business impact. And it’s also something that helped me stand out as a designer more than once. But I’ve kept building on that foundation. Most recently, I attended Ryan Scott’s Data for Designers workshop, which gave me new tools and language for describing design’s return on investment. Ryan has led design at Airbnb, DoorDash, and Uber, and now runs excellent courses and cohorts on ROI and data for designers. If you’re a little further into your career and want to sharpen this skill, I can only recommend checking out his programs — they’re some of the best opportunities out there to grow this side of your practice.

Why This Matters for You

Here’s why this is relevant, especially if you’re early in your career: the ability to connect design work to business outcomes instantly makes you look more senior. Employers don’t just want to see polished mockups — they want to see that you understand why design exists in the first place.

Now, you might already be thinking: “But all I have is fictional work in my portfolio” or “I don’t have results from my projects because they were never fully implemented or measured.” That’s normal — most juniors are in the exact same situation. And here’s the good news: showing the thinking alone gets you 80% of the way there. You don’t need perfect numbers to stand out — you just need to demonstrate that you understand how design connects to impact.

We’ll get into how you can do that later in the article. For now, keep in mind that even without real metrics, framing your work in business terms makes your portfolio stronger, your interviews smoother, and your profile far more credible.

What “Impact” Really Means

When you hear “impact” in design, don’t think about nicer visuals or cleaner flows. Think about how your design contributes to what the business actually cares about.

Business goals usually boil down to a few things: increasing revenue, keeping customers around longer, reducing costs, or making the company more efficient. Design plays a role in all of these — by removing friction, earning trust, or reducing support needs — but only if you show the connection.

How Design Connects to Business Metrics

A common mistake is to say: “I simplified the checkout flow, so I increased revenue.” That’s too big a leap.

In reality, design connects to business through a chain:

• Design actions: what you actually did (e.g. redesigned checkout).

• Design metrics: what you can measure directly (task success rate, error rate, support tickets, drop-off).

• Business outcomes: what leadership cares about (revenue, retention, cost savings).

Your role is to show how one influences the other. For example:

Notice how you don’t need to measure revenue yourself. You measure what’s within reach (like task success), then connect it logically to a business outcome.

Showing Business Awareness in Your Work

Even without access to company revenue numbers, you can still show business awareness in how you present your projects. Start by clearly framing the before and after of your design. If it took five steps to reach checkout and you reduced it to three, that already tells a story of improved efficiency.

Translate the UX signals you can observe — success rates, fewer clicks, clearer error handling — into the language of business: higher conversion, cost savings, retention. Don’t be afraid to estimate responsibly. You can say, “Based on research, this could reduce abandonment by 15%.” As long as you state your assumptions, this shows you understand the bigger picture.

And use the vocabulary: activation, conversion, retention, churn, efficiency, cost savings. Even if you don’t own those numbers, framing your design in those terms shows you’re thinking like someone who does. Frameworks like Google’s HEART or NN/g’s ROI guidelines can help structure this thinking. But if you want hands-on practice in tying design work to business results, Ryan Scott’s cohorts are among the best ways to build that muscle.

Structuring a Case Study With Impact

When you write a portfolio piece, use the business-aware chain to guide your structure:

1. Problem / Business Context — what the company or product needed to achieve.

2. Design Goal — what you targeted (reduce drop-off, improve activation, cut support costs).

3. Process & Decisions — your research, the options you explored, and trade-offs.

4. Solution — the design you delivered, ideally with before/after.

5. Impact or Expected Impact — the chain from design action → design metric → business outcome.

6. Reflection — what worked, what didn’t, and what this means for the business.

That last step — showing reflection in a business-aware way — is what makes a junior portfolio feel more like a mid-level one.

Final Thoughts

Design isn’t decoration. It’s one of the strongest levers for business performance when used intentionally.

Even early in your career, you can stand out by showing that you don’t just design flows in Figma — you design with an eye toward impact. By linking your actions to measurable UX outcomes, and then to business results, you present yourself as someone who thinks like a designer and a strategist.

That’s the difference between blending in and getting noticed.

👀 Portfolio Showcase

Today: Siddharth Hardikar

Illustrated, animated, and built with love — Siddharth’s portfolio makes that promise right at the top, and the moment you dive in, you can tell he means it.

Currently pursuing his master’s in HCDE at the University of Washington, Siddharth is still early in his career, but his portfolio carries the confidence and craft of someone much further along. With a Google apprenticeship already under his belt and a range of thoughtfully executed case studies, he’s managed to strike a rare balance: playful, personality-filled presentation that still feels curated and professional.

I first came across Siddharth’s work while browsing through student portfolios — and his stood out immediately. Not because it’s loud or flashy, but because it’s unusually well-composed. Small animations, subtle interactions, and moments of delight run throughout the site, but never tip over into distraction. It feels joyful and carefully made — which, in a sea of portfolios that often look interchangeable, is no small achievement.

But beyond surface polish, what really makes Siddharth’s portfolio shine is how he tells stories through visuals and how he connects his design work to impact. Let’s take a closer look.

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

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Do you want your own portfolio reviewed in-depth with a 30-minute advice-packed video review? Or do you require mentoring to figure out a proper strategy for your job search?

I got you!

• Book an in-depth portfolio or resume review with me

• Book a mentoring session with me

• Book a quick 15 min chat to ask a question and see if we vibe

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