If you want to make career in product management you may have heard about making product portfolio. In this blog we will discuss:

1.  What is product portfolio?

2. Importance of making it

3. How you can make your product portfolio?

So you may recall that fashion models usually have a portfolio in which they have all the projects they worked on, and their pictures in different poses. This helps the recruiter to see the potential of the model and finding the write fit for the fashion show.

Similarly as aspiring product manager, you should have a product portfolio in which you have a collection of products you have done project on it can be as simple as PPT.

If you don't have experience to have an experience in product management o create product portfolio, you can basically create it based on your study and understanding, I will let you know how later in this blog.

As with everything in product management, I will start this guide with a strong Why?

Why at all should you invest time and effort into creating a portfolio?

Let me be clear from the start that creating your portfolio is not going to be an easy task. You’ll have to commit time, and substantial efforts to create a remarkable portfolio.

Hence having a clear why will help you keep the motivation while creating a remarkable portfolio.

Here are three reasons why you should absolutely create a portfolio if you are an aspiring product manager.

1. Develop skillset for Product management:  Doing practical helps you develop the the skillsets and it is the most effective form of learning. The act of creating a portfolio, helps you transform your learnings into PM skillsets. You can't become cook unless you don't actually cook.
2. All your learning at one place: A portfolio can also be used to collect your most important learnings through projects. Consider as a collection of your best product work, which you can refer to all along with your professional career.
3. Helps you get job and internship: If you don't have work experience in Product management, this is the way to show the recruiters that you have done something about it on your own and you are passionate about the role. This gives you a competitive edge over other candidates who applied for the role.

Product portfolios come in different shapes and sizes, however, the objective of all of them is to showcase your product management skills.

Usually people write a blog on a Product Management Concept and call it product portfolio.

 But this is not the right way here are what you can do to create your product portfolio which tells recruiter that you are the right candidate for them:

✅Analysis of the products:

You can pick a product of your choice and do an exhaustive product analysis. 

You can find products from platforms such as the Play Store, App Store, Product Hunt, or even the product of the company you want to apply for a job.

Here is what you can include in your analysis:
1. What problem(s) does the product solves?
2. Who is facing this problem (user persona)?
3. What the user journey looks like?
4. Who are the competitors and how are they solving this problem?
5. What is unique about this product(USP)?
6. How does this makes money?

7. What is the market size of the product?

8. What is the market growth of the product?

9. New opportunity or needs which the product can also solve.

Bonus points, you can talk to actual users to answer the above questions.

Once done, you can then include this analysis in your portfolio webpage.

Analysis of different product in that industry

Here you start with an Industry in mind and analyze the different products in that Industry. 

For example, you can choose the industry to be Foodtech apps, and can now compare Swiggy and Zomato side by side.

This will help you understand market dynamics, user needs, and differentiating factors among similar products.

In this analysis you can explore things like:

1. Dynamics of this market. How big is the market, and how is it growing?
2. User insights: Who are the popular users in this category, and what problems got them to use these products?
3. What are the different products in this category? Can you further categorize them?
4. Create a feature comparison and pricing comparison chart.
5. What differentiates one product from the other?
6. If users have to choose one among them, which one would they choose and why?

You should read reviews about the products from sites such as Quora, Reddit, G2Crowd, TrustPilot, etc. A list of websites that can help you with your industry research at given in the footnotes of this article.

🛠 Product Improvement

Here you can go a step ahead, and start suggesting the improvements in the popular products. You can choose a product of your choice and follow the product thinking framework to suggest some improvements.

As the concluding step, you will also use some design tools like Figma, to actually showcase your improvements as wireframes or high fidelity designs.

Here is the framework product managers generally follow to improve any product:

1. Find the users who might be using the product (user persona).
2. Find their problems (these problems could be inside the product or might be related to the core jobs to be done for the users).
3. Prioritize the problems based on the estimated impact of solving them.
4. Come up with multiple solutions for the top problems.
5. Prioritize the solutions by using the simple Impact v/s Effort comparison.
6. For the top prioritized solution, create the user flow and design (wireframes or actual)
7. Decide the metrics which you would measure to find out the success of this improvement.

You can articulate these steps in your analysis and add them to your portfolio.

 Solution for the problem

In this kind of portfolio item, you start with a problem and come up with your solutions (in the form of products) to solve them.

For example, many people face the problem of forgetting what they read, to solve this problem we could have multiple solutions. 

One solution could be to do timely revision through flashcards, sending yourself automated emails in the future with some content to revise, etc.

Now you can wear your product hat, think of a few problems you and people you know face frequently, and how can you create a solution for that.

You can either just create a wireframe or design for the solution, or you can go a step further to use a no-code tool to actually bring it to life.

Few points that might help you in this exercise:
1. You can use the design thinking framework to come up with solutions.
2. You should talk to other people who might be facing similar problems to empathize and understand better.
3. You should estimate the demand for this kind of product (guesstimate).
4. You should test this finished solution with multiple people to actually understand the adoption and plan the next possible iterations.

Here are some tools you and resources to help you create designs:

👷🏾Use No-code tools to build the solution

This is an extension of the previous exercise. With so many powerful yet easy-to-use no-code tools, there is nothing stopping you from bringing your simple product ideas to life.

If you are able to add something like this to your portfolio, it would definitely be the highlight, and most probably make your profile stand out.

Even if you know how to code, I would strongly recommend you to try some of these out, as they drastically reduce the time to ship and iterate.

Here are a few tools and related tutorials to help you create your own products with knowing how to code.

🚀 Launch a product and document your journey

This is taking your product journey to a whole new level.

By actually launching and taking your product to the market you will understand integral concepts of product management like customer development, experimentation, creating a go-to-market strategy, etc.

The users with whom you have done your initial research could be the first set of users for your finished product. If you keep documenting your journey in public, people would find your product and the bandwagon will continue.

You can launch your product on Producthunt, Reddit, BetaList, or even on your personal social network profile on LinkedIn, Twitter (or even your WhatsApp status update)

Popular tools to create your product portfolio

There are lots of tools through which you can create a well presentable portfolio, so much so that sometimes choosing one could become overwhelming. I have seen folks using their social profiles as portfolios and that is perfectly fine. While every tool and platform has its pros and cons, I strongly would suggest you go ahead choose anyone right now and start creating. Getting started is the most important part of your portfolio creation journey.

Notion

The top tool I would recommend is notion. It’s super easy to get up and running without any setup.Just create an index page where you can keep adding the pages and links later on. The SEO discovery might be an issue here but that doesn’t stops you from sharing your portfolio and work with anyone through the direct link.

WordPress

You can create a portfolio in WordPress. It’s beginner-friendly and you can use its block editor to add any kind of information, host files, and even get good discovery through search engines.While the free version (wordpress.com) has limitations, you can use the self-hosted version (wordpress.org) with any of the popular hosting companies and host your portfolio on your own domain. This might cost you around $10 every month or so, you will get so many designs to choose from and will look more professional.

Medium

Medium.com is another platform to get started with your product journey documentation. I am sure many of the case studies, and articles we have read so far have been hosted on medium only.The platform is SEO friendly, free, easy to get started, and might get your additional reach through recommendations and newsletter. Recently they have started blocking content to get people to signup/pay before they could read content, so just keep that in mind.

Portfolio platforms

Platforms such as Behance, Dribble, UXFolio, etc. can also be used to host your product portfolio. They were originally made for UX/UI designers but could be used by product managers as well to host analysis, wireframes, etc.

I hope this will be helpful to you, if you want to prepare for Product Management role by Microsoft, Adobe and Accenture Product Managers you can join our latest cohort batch.