Cap Watkins

What they show

A homepage that is a single first-person page: Platform Design Director at QuickBooks; before that Head of Product Design at Lattice (a full UI and navigation refresh, AI integration); before that CXO at Primary, responsible for engineering, design, product and people, including a brand refresh and an e-commerce platform migration; before that VP of Design at BuzzFeed, where he ran Product Design and also, at various points, Brand Design, IT and Branded Content Operations, and started Hack Week and 'Manager Dens'. Then Etsy, Amazon, startups. One photo. Nav: Blog, Speaking, Email. A footer that says the site doesn't track you and everything was written by a human.

Why it works at this level

It proves that a leadership portfolio can be a paragraph if the paragraph is specific enough. Every role comes with one or two concrete things he did there, and several of them are organizational (support groups for managers, running the review process, taking on IT) rather than design deliverables. The breadth of the CXO role is stated matter-of-factly, which is more convincing than dressing it up. The blog carries the rest: it's been running for years and is where his thinking on management actually lives. For a Director reader, this is permission to stop building a gallery and start writing.

What to steal

Try writing your entire portfolio as one page of prose, one paragraph per role, each with the two most specific things you did there, at least one of them about the organization rather than the product. If it holds up, you may not need the grid. Keep a blog if you're going to keep it; a two-year gap reads worse than not having one.

What I'd change

One thing I'd push on. Every site here is good; this is the note I'd send the author.

There is no visual evidence anywhere, and the site makes no attempt to point at the products. Even a row of links to the things he's shipped would let a skeptical reader check the claims.