Buzz Usborne
Principal Designer at Help Scout
The reference Principal portfolio: hands-on, framed around leverage.
What they show
A one-paragraph intro that positions him as equally interested in producing the work and in creating the conditions for high-quality design at scale, followed by a tight grid of projects: Help Scout's Inbox, Jira at Atlassian, a compliance product, a chat widget, and Prevue, the product he founded, ran solo for a decade and sold. A separate writing section, a CV page, and a coaching practice for design leaders are all one click away. Each project card is captioned with a first-person, one-line claim ('I shook up a 14-year-old product everyone hated').
Why it works at this level
Principal is the hardest level to portfolio because the reader wants proof of craft and proof of influence at the same time, and most sites pick one. Buzz does both by keeping the grid visual and craft-heavy while the copy around it is entirely about scale, conditions and teams. The founded-and-sold product is the quiet trump card: it settles the business-judgment question before anyone asks. The project captions are worth studying on their own; each one states the outcome in a sentence a hiring manager will remember.
What to steal
Write a one-line, first-person outcome for every project and use it as the card caption. Keep the visual work visual, but make every sentence of surrounding copy about the conditions you created, not the pixels you moved. If you've built or shipped anything on your own, put it in the grid next to the day-job work.
What I'd change
One thing I'd push on. Every site here is good; this is the note I'd send the author.
The coaching and AI-tooling content is starting to compete with the portfolio for attention on the homepage. A Principal reader wants the work first.