Design leadership portfolios, annotated.
34 portfolios from UX Managers, Directors, VPs, Principals, Founders and Executives. Every entry comes with notes on why it works at that level and what you can take from it. New to this? Start with the Guide.
34 portfolios
Anton Gubarev-Pentin
Product Design Manager, QIC
Three stages of building a team, each shown with its artifacts.
ManagerEnterprise
FeaturedEmily Campbell
Director of Design for AI Models at Figma
A role timeline where each line carries a working product fragment.
DirectorBig Tech
Pavel Bukengolts
Founder and Head of Product Design & Strategy, UX Design Lab
Six case studies, no client names, each with a verb, a decision and a result.
DirectorAgency
Renato Valdés-Olmos
Co-founder, Noord
Every role stated as scope, decision and business result.
VPFounderStartup
Ted Goas
Design Manager, Dialpad
First designer to manager of eight, told as one arc.
ManagerStartup
Ashwarya Subhluxmi
Design Leader, Marketplace at Credit Karma (Intuit)
The picture, the team, and the product, in that order.
DirectorBig Tech
Oriol Bedia
Design Leader
Designer, manager, mentor, each with its own column.
ManagerStartup
Ramy Adel
Head of Product Design at a digital retail bank
Team scope stated to the person, and research ops as the case study.
DirectorEnterprise
Ben Roach
Senior Staff UX Manager at Google
Leads with numbers that prove leverage, not craft.
ManagerPrincipalBig TechCurator
Joel Califa
VP Design at Unify
A career told as a timeline, with leadership as its own case study.
VPStartup
Buzz Usborne
Principal Designer at Help Scout
The reference Principal portfolio: hands-on, framed around leverage.
PrincipalStartup
Tanner Christensen
Leads software design for autonomy and design systems at Anduril
The zero-to-one design org, written as a case study.
DirectorEnterprise
Aarron Walter
Co-founder, Design Better
Work organized by role and tenure, not by artifact.
VPFounderIndependent
Marissa Louie
Head of Product and UX Design (consulting)
Leadership case studies filed next to product case studies, on purpose.
DirectorIndependent
Sandeep Datar
VP, User Experience and Design
What a VP portfolio looks like when the work can't be shown.
VPEnterprise
Chelsea Watson
UX Design Leader & Strategist
Every case study written in the leader's voice.
DirectorIndependent
Matthew Holloway
Fractional Design Leader & Executive Coach
The post-executive site: selling leadership itself, not seeking a role.
VPIndependent
Andrés Clavijo
Director of UX at Hourly
Design operations presented as leadership case studies.
DirectorStartup
Harrison Wheeler
Founder, LeadCraft
Case studies where the org chart is the deliverable.
DirectorIndependent
Aastha Gaur
Sr. Director, UX at Google
No case studies. A leadership philosophy and a management curriculum instead.
DirectorBig Tech
Rachel Kobe
Chief Design Executive
The C-suite version: a thesis, a writing practice, an advisory offer.
ExecutiveIndependent
Jehad Affoneh
Chief Design Officer at Toast
A working CDO's site is a newsletter with a bio attached.
ExecutiveEnterprise
Cap Watkins
Platform Design Director at QuickBooks (Intuit)
The anti-portfolio: five paragraphs and a blog.
DirectorBig Tech
Rakesh Patwari
Experience design leader at Walmart
Every case study plotted by the kind of leadership it took.
DirectorEnterprise
Josh Taylor
Head of Design, Hedra
Growth-stage leadership told as one story: 5 designers to 40.
DirectorStartup
Julie Zhuo
Founder, Sundial
The hub model: one page pointing at a body of work that lives elsewhere.
FounderStartup
Mike Davidson
Design Executive leading the largest design team at Microsoft AI
An executive's site that is entirely essays, and the essays are the argument.
ExecutiveBig Tech
Scott Belsky
Partner, A24 and founder, A24 Labs
One thesis on the homepage, and everything else supports it.
FounderEnterprise
Andy Budd
Founder, Clearleft, UX London and Leading Design
Agency founder to advisor, with the companies he built as the credentials.
FounderAgency
Peter Merholz
Co-founder, Adaptive Path
The book became the practice, and the site sells the practice.
FounderIndependent
Tobias van Schneider
Founder and Creative Director, HOVS
Founder credit attached to every project, so the ventures read as work.
FounderStartup
Dan Mall
Founder, SuperFriendly
A founder's site organized by what he teaches, not what he made.
FounderAgency
Jeffrey Zeldman
Founder, Happy Cog, A List Apart and An Event Apart at Automattic
Thirty years of publishing under one name is the portfolio.
FounderAgency
Ryan Rumsey
Founder, Second Wave Dive and CDO School
Multiple brands for multiple audiences, run by one former exec.
FounderIndependent
Browse by level
Each level has its own page: what the reader is asking, and every example at that level.
- Design manager portfolios →4Can you run a team and still do the work?
- UX and design director portfolios →13Can you run a business area, not just a team?
- VP of Design portfolios →5Have you run a function, and what changed under you?
- Principal designer portfolios →2Can you raise the bar for people who don't report to you?
- Design founder portfolios →10What did you build, and would I want to build the next thing with you?
- Design executive portfolios →3What do you believe about how design should work inside a company, and can you say it in a way a board would understand?