Lisa Orr

[template] Portfolio Website for Product Managers

August 2022 · 4 min read

tl;dr Showcase your work with a free product portfolio website. Details and a template below.

If you're a product manager, you've got stories to tell. Stories such as “We had a crazy deadline and we made some hard calls” or “It almost didn't launch but I talked the CEO off the ledge.”

You tell these stories in your interviews and the hiring panel goes “Wow! Tell me more!” and you fill them in on the gooey details.

Makes you wonder… why are these stories only uncovered in a live interview? How many opportunities have you missed out on by being judged solely on your resume?

Introducing: Product Manager Portfolios

Nicole Mors and I designed a portfolio template for sharing great product stories. You can use it to create, personalize, and deploy your own portfolio for free.

In the sections below: how to get your own site up and running, an overview of the features included, and advice on personalizing it and telling your best product stories.

Get started with copying and publishing the template

To host and personalize your own portfolio, you'll need a GitHub account, the ability to edit and build the webpages locally, and a free hosting account (Vercel, GitHub Pages, or similar all work). All steps in this process are free.

Even if you have no coding experience, a template like this is lightweight enough that it's worth giving a go — writing the content is always the hardest part anyway.

The structure of the portfolio

The portfolio is built to highlight you and the projects you've worked on, and it's kept dead simple for that purpose. Here are the pages included:

• Home. Orient your reader with a brief introduction to yourself and links to your recently published projects. You can also include a headshot and a link to download your resume.
• About. Tell the reader a bit more about yourself and your path into product.
• Projects. The projects you've worked on. Each gets its own page highlighting your role, execution, challenges, and achievements.

Writing product stories

For each product you've launched or initiative you've led, create a new project page to highlight the story behind your work. Each project page has the following sections (modify as you see fit):

• Product. A short description of the product created — keep it simple enough that anyone can understand what it is.
• My role. A list of the different hats you wore during the product's lifecycle. Be descriptive about your responsibilities, e.g. Solution Champion, Customer Discovery Lead, Champion to Leadership, Community Manager.
• Execution. Details on the discovery, delivery, and launch phases of the product. This section should demonstrate your skillset around driving product discovery, delivery, and launch initiatives.
• Challenges & achievements. A list of the different challenges you faced during execution, as well as what was accomplished. Challenges are of particular interest to hiring managers, since they demonstrate critical PM skills like perseverance, stakeholder management, and prioritization.

Personalizing your portfolio

Make the portfolio your own: social media links, a favicon, a catchy link preview, your resume, and your headshot or other fun pictures. It's also worth linking out to an external blog (no point rebuilding what's already free and readily available, like Medium) rather than trying to host a full CMS yourself.

Build and deploy

Once you've written your content, the process is: build locally, push to GitHub, and deploy through your host of choice. Most free hosts will automatically publish your repo to a free subdomain, and you can point a custom domain (like this one) at it directly.

Happy portfolio building!