Portfolio Management

Most portfolios fail in the first 10 seconds. Here’s why: I'll tell you exactly when I know a portfolio won't make it past my screen. The moment I land on "Hi, I'm a passionate designer who loves solving problems..." Listen. I've already read your CV. I know your name, your experience, and where you're based. I don't need a repeat performance. What do I need? To see if you can actually design. Here's what happens when I review portfolios: I have 10 seconds to decide if your work is worth 5 minutes of my additional review and hours of the interview process. And you're wasting those seconds telling me you "love design." Of course, you love design. You're a designer. That's expected. Show me this instead: → Your work / style / taste (Immediately) → The problems you've solved → The impact you've created → Your actual design thinking When I land on your portfolio, I'm looking for: First impressions that matter. Is it accessible? Any animations that show craft? Does it load fast? Can I navigate intuitively? Your portfolio IS the first design problem I see you solve. And if you can't design for me, your user, why would I trust you with my users? What actually gets you hired: ✓ Business context as a stage setting ✓ Your specific role (not "I did everything") ✓ Team composition and timeline ✓ The REAL problem you solved Not 20 personas. Not 50 wireframes. Not your entire design process is outlined. Give me: - 2-3 key research insights - 1 example of iteration that mattered - The final solution (3 screens max) - Actual impact or expected metrics Here's the brutal truth: I don't care about your design philosophy. I care if you can move my metrics. Design isn't just about beauty or experience. It's about business impact. Show me you understand that balance: - Skip the autobiography. Start with your best work. - Make me think "I need to talk to this person". Not "I need to read more about them." Your portfolio should work like your best designs: Clear. Intuitive. Impactful. Remember: I've hired dozens of designers. The ones who got offers? They showed me their thinking through their work. Not through their "About Me". Designers, what's the first thing visitors see on your portfolio? Time for some honest self-assessment (and a potential change).

🚨You want a job? ❌You keep getting rejected over and over? Here’s the hard truth: 👇 ✅(1) Clarity Open your portfolio for one second. Can you immediately tell, with 100% certainty, what role you’re aiming for? Put yourself in the shoes of a recruiter who looks at hundreds of portfolios per day. For example, if you want to be hired as a Character Artist,⬇️ ➡️ ONLY post characters. ➡️NOTHING else. No props. No environments. No concept art. ✅(2) Presentation Imagine spending weeks, or even months, on a project, only to rush the renders in a single night.🤯 How much time do you spend on your renders? How many iterations before you land on something strong? 👉The answer is probably not enough. ➡️Sleep on it. ➡️Come back later. ➡️Get feedback. ➡️Study how your favorite artists render their work. ➡️What software do they use? ➡️ How do they frame and light their shots? 🚨The truth is: presentation can make a project look 100x better. 🔔 If you look closely, I added the same characters in both examples, but the twist is, in the first images, the renders were rapidly made and rushed. ✅(3) Background & Profile Picture ➡️If possible, give your portfolio a theme🎨 ➡️Something consistent. Something that catches attention. ❌ Not just random colors thrown together. ➡️The same goes for profile pictures: ➡️Use something professional or visually striking. ➡️Avoid random selfies, it looks unprofessional and can work against you. ✅(4) Less Is More You might be tempted to include every school or personal project. But often, that’s exactly what’s holding you back. ➡️Go through your portfolio and ask yourself: ❓If this was the ONLY piece in my portfolio, would I get hired? ➡️If the answer is no, cut it.  🚩Weak projects are like giant red flags. They pull attention away from your stronger work. ➡️Most artists need to remove 50–80% of what’s in their portfolio. ✅(5) Treat Your Portfolio Like a Job If your last project was posted 6–12 months ago⏳ your chances of getting hired are close to zero. ➡️Work on your craft like it’s a full-time job: ➡️Minimum of 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. ➡️Be willing to sacrifice. Many others already are, and they’re the ones taking the jobs. ➡️Post a major new project every 1–2 months. ➡️Share every step of your progress openly on LinkedIn. 🚨I can’t count how many times recruiters and lead artists reached out just because they saw how consistently I was producing. ✅(6) Connections, Connections, Connections The more people who see your work, the more opportunities you get. 👉Extreme example: ➡️Person A has 100,000 connections. ➡️Person B has 200 connections. ➡️They both post the exact same project. 🚨Person "A" has 500x more chances to get seen by a recruiter. So: send invitations. Comment. Talk to people. Do it daily. The snowball effect is real. 👉 That’s the difference between hoping and actually getting hired.

I’ve reviewed > 400 portfolios this year. Observation #1: The ones that got interviews weren’t the prettiest. They were the clearest. → Clear intent (what roles they’re targeting) → Clear structure (who they helped + what changed) → Clear thinking (how they made decisions) Observation #2: Hiring managers responded best to portfolios that made it easy to scan, not admire. → 3-5 second headlines that told the story → Metrics up top, visuals in the middle, lessons at the end → Less storytelling. More signal. Observation #3: The portfolios that ‘failed’? → Opened with “Hi, I’m Alex and I love solving problems” → Contained 30+ screenshots with no explanation → Didn’t articulate business impact or their role → Had no opinion, no POV, no process If I were applying today? → I’d restructure my case studies to lead with outcomes → I’d add a design philosophy section to show how I think → I’d cut 40% of the fluff and focus on what actually matters → I’d communicate my USP and elevator pitch up front Your portfolio isn’t a gallery. It’s a business case for why you’re worth hiring. ----- Just thought I'd share this after reviewing some notes over the weekend. Hope it helps! ----- #ux #tech #design #ai #business #careers

Are our portfolios still calibrated to a climate that no longer exists? This is a valuable topic to discuss with your investment consultant during your next strategic asset allocation review. This question is more complex than most climate disclosures indicate. Many capital market assumptions still implicitly assume that the climate is stationary. Strategic asset allocations (SAA) are based on decades of historical data. Diversification assumptions may hold in typical years but can fail during critical periods. Physical risks are often treated as tail events, even as such risks become more frequent. This is not a fringe concern. The USS / University of Exeter No Time To Lose report and the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries' Emperor's New Climate Scenarios have made this case; many climate scenarios used by financial institutions may understate risk because they fail to capture tipping points, compound events and non-linear damages. Climate scenario analysis has improved significantly, but in many cases it remains separate from the strategic asset allocation process rather than fully integrated. It primarily supports reporting requirements. However, does it influence capital market assumptions, portfolio construction, or the strategic asset allocation itself? For funds with long-term, intergenerational mandates such as pensions, sovereign wealth funds, and endowments, the current El Niño is not the primary concern. The greater concern is the shifting baseline underlying future El Niño events and whether portfolio assumptions have adapted accordingly. Four questions worth exploring with your consultant at the next SAA review, borrowed from the world of cyber resilience: Anticipate: Do our scenarios address specific physical pathways such as multi-breadbasket failure, monsoon disruption, grid-cooling stress, and wildfires, or do they focus mainly on transition risk? Withstand: Where might hidden correlations exist? For example, Australian, Brazilian, and Indian agricultural exposures may appear diversified in typical years but can become highly correlated during an El Niño event. Recover: Do we have the governance, conviction, and liquidity to act as a stabiliser when assets and markets reprice? Adapt: Are climate-resilient infrastructure, energy systems, food systems, transport, water, and adaptation technologies considered core allocations over a 30-year horizon, or are they still treated as peripheral? At your next away day, ensure climate scenarios are integral to the strategic asset allocation process. A practical first step is to work with your investment consultant to review the climate scenario set used in the previous strategic asset allocation exercise, assess the severity of excluded scenarios, and evaluate how those exclusions influenced the final allocation. This discussion may reveal where the most future risks may lie. David Friedberg provides a useful four-minute overview of the developing El Niño on the All-In Podcast. 

David McNellis, Christian Olinger, and I published a note today on the Total Portfolio Approach. For those who are not as close to this framework, TPA encourages/forces CIOs and investment teams to look across asset classes, not just in their strategic asset allocation vertical, to allocate capital (versus are you the best manager in a select vertical, which is akin to the more traditional Strategic Asset Allocation). This mindset shift represents a potential important change for some of the largest allocators in our industry towards more relative value comparisons across asset classes, geographies, and capital structures. In our experience, the practical advantages often show up most clearly in Private Markets because Private Markets introduce complexity around liquidity, pacing, and governance that traditional asset-class buckets were not always designed to handle. Therefore, we at KKR believe a more holistic total portfolio lens can help investors better manage liquidity, provide flexibility, particularly during drawdowns by avoiding mechanical reactions to denominator effects, improve vintage diversification, and better compete for capital across strategies. That said, we do not think TPA is a silver bullet. It is not a substitute for skill in forecasting, manager selection, or underwriting. And for many organizations, a ‘minimum viable portfolio' version, strengthening portfolio-level analytics and refreshing relative value views more frequently, may be the most practical starting point. In a world where return ranges may be narrower and dispersion wider, how we allocate capital across the whole portfolio could matter as much as where we allocate it. Read more at https://go.kkr.com/4badWlI #TotalPortfolioApproach #CIO #AssetAllocation

With public equity and fixed income markets in turmoil in recent weeks the traditional 60:40 portfolio model has again been challenged. There's little doubt uncertainty will pervade these markets for the foreseeable future. Therefore it is timely to release further research on the beneficial portfolio characteristics of private market assets. In this paper "Optimising private market asset allocations" we examine the integration of this asset class within traditional asset allocation strategies to  assess performance impacts across investor risk profiles. We believe that including private market assets can significantly enhance portfolio returns for investors who adopt a risk-based utility-maximising strategy in portfolio construction. Additionally, we find that unlisted infrastructure has the most potential of the private market assets considered to improve portfolio Sharpe ratios, especially for ‘Defensive’ and ‘Balanced’ investors. Our research applies a utility maximisation framework which facilitates risk appetite aware optimisation to tailor portfolios to match specific investor risk preferences and lifecycle stages. A novel two-stage returns unsmoothing approach is used to more accurately estimate true private market return volatility. We show that even after returns unsmoothing, private markets can significantly enhance portfolio outcomes. This study finds that defensive investors benefit from allocations  to infrastructure and private credit, achieving lower volatility and higher returns. Balanced investors see similar advantages with  a stable allocation to infrastructure, while growth investors lean towards private equity for higher risk-reward profiles. This analysis adds further weight to our assertion that private market assets have a material role to play in optimising investor portfolios. With IFM Investors Economics & research Frans van den Bogaerde, CFA and Christopher Skondreas #investment #assetallocation #risk #privatemarkets #portfolioconstruction

I’m offering 5 free UX portfolio reviews. Not a quick skim. A real breakdown of what’s working, what’s hurting you, and what hiring managers actually notice. I’ll review the first 5 portfolios I see in the comments. Before you drop yours, here’s one thing I see in almost every junior portfolio: They show what they made, but not how they thought. Hiring managers are not just evaluating the UI. They are trying to understand how you approach problems. Instead of writing: “Created wireframes for the onboarding flow” Or “Designed a new checkout experience” Show the decision-making behind it: What problem actually triggered the work? What constraints existed (time, tech, business goals)? What options did you explore before landing on the final solution? What trade-offs did you make? Great portfolios reveal how a designer thinks under real-world pressure. That is what makes someone hireable. If you want feedback on yours, drop your portfolio below. I’ll review the first 5 I see.

I have reviewed over 200 portfolios as a hiring manager. I never spent 20 minutes on one. Here is what actually happens in 30 seconds. Second 1 to 5. I read your headline and your About section. I am answering one question: does this person do what I am hiring for? If it says "Product Designer" I have nothing. If it says "I help financial products reduce drop-off at the point of KYC" I know immediately. Second 5 to 10. I scan your case study titles. Not the content. The titles. "Redesigning the Checkout Flow" tells me nothing. "Reducing Drop-off by 34% for 2M Monthly Users" tells me everything. I have already decided whether to scroll further. Second 10 to 20. I open one case study. I read the first two sentences. If those sentences tell me what changed because of your work, I keep reading. If they tell me about your design process, I close the tab. Not because process does not matter. Because process does not differentiate you from the other 200 people in my pipeline. Second 20 to 30. I am looking for one thing. Can I picture this person doing this job? Not this job in general. This specific role. At this specific company. At this level. If the answer is yes in 30 seconds, you get shortlisted. If I have to imagine it, you do not. That is four decisions in 30 seconds. Role fit. Relevance. Impact. Level. Most portfolios fail at decision one. The headline says "Product Designer" or "UX Designer" or "Passionate about solving complex problems." All interchangeable. All forgettable. Your Figma files are not the problem. Your case study count is not the problem. Your Notion layout is not the problem. The signal that wraps the work is the problem. A recruiter running a Greenhouse or Lever pipeline can see that signal in 7 seconds before they click your name. A hiring manager sees it in 30 seconds before they open a single case study. If that signal is unclear, nothing after it matters. The work in your portfolio is strong. It usually is at your level. The question is whether anyone can tell in 30 seconds.

Could strategic misalignment be keeping you and your organization away from attaining maximum value? Executives and project managers are often rowing in different directions. The boat moves, but not necessarily toward value. From my doctoral research, and work with several clients, three pillars of strategic alignment consistently separate high-performing organizations from the rest: 1️⃣ Common Goals – A shared definition of success at both the strategic and operational levels. 2️⃣ Shared Language – Clear communication that bridges “executive speak” and project management terms. 3️⃣ Mutual Understanding – Executives gain insight into project realities, while PMs understand the strategic trade-offs leaders are balancing. The challenge? Most organizations talk about alignment but rarely make it a living system. That’s why I created the ALIGN™ Framework as a practical roadmap: 🪀 A – Assess the Value Chain → Define where value is created and lost. 🪀 L – Listen Across Levels → Build the “bilingual dictionary” across teams. 🪀 I – Integrate Strategy into Planning → Include PMs early in design, not just delivery. 🪀 G – Guide with Goals & Guardrails → Establish clarity with KPIs, OKRs, and constraints. 🪀 N – Navigate with Data & Confluence → Create mutual understanding with dashboards, forums, and collaboration tools. 🔑 ALIGN™ isn’t just an acronym. It’s the operating system for embedding the three pillars of Common Goals, Shared Language, and Mutual Understanding into everyday practice. When organizations apply it, strategy stops being a lofty document and becomes a lived reality. 📌 Question for you: In your organization, which of these three pillars: common goals, shared language, or mutual understanding requires the most urgent attention? Let's create the bride to ALIGN! ♻️Share to elevate others and follow🎙️Fola F. Alabi for more! #FolaElevates #StrategicLeadership #ProjectManagement #SPL #StrategicAlignment #Align #ExecutionExcellence #StrategicConfluenc

Setting effective goals is challenging, especially at the scale of a company like Meta. In a recent blog post, Meta’s analytics team shares their approach to goal setting through a tool called the Goal Map: a conceptual framework that connects team-level metrics to company-wide outcomes, helping teams prioritize the right work and measure impact more effectively. Here’s how it works: teams align their goals with broader objectives, use a tiering system to prioritize what matters most, set targets that balance ambition and achievability, and track progress through experiments, milestones, and long-term trends. Everything ties back to the Goal Map—ensuring that all efforts remain connected to meaningful outcomes. The result is greater focus, stronger coordination, and more informed decision-making across teams. It’s a valuable framework for any data-driven organization looking to scale without losing sight of its strategic goals: a recommended reading. #DataScience #Analytics #BusinessMetrics #GoalSetting #ProductAnalytics #SnacksWeeklyonDataScience – – –  Check out the "Snacks Weekly on Data Science" podcast and subscribe, where I explain in more detail the concepts discussed in this and future posts:    -- Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gKgaMvbh   -- Apple Podcast: https://lnkd.in/gj6aPBBY    -- Youtube: https://lnkd.in/gcwPeBmR https://lnkd.in/gHFkBEPY