I’m Done Waiting to Be Ready
Season 6 · Solo episode
What preparation can teach us, what portfolios need to show, and why confidence does not always come first.
With Nick Mann · 20:28
Episode overview
I kept telling myself I needed a little more time. More research. A better version. A few more things finished before I could bring the podcast back. Some of that was preparation. Some of it was a way to keep putting off the work I wanted to share.
In this solo episode, I talk about what I’ve learned from studying UX portfolios, why showing your process is only part of communicating your value, and what I’m building with UX Growth Portfolios. I also talk about my dad, the responsibilities that came after losing him, and what he taught me about moving before confidence arrives. This is where Season 6 begins.
Five things to take with you
Ask what the next round of preparation will change. Improving the work matters. Repeating the same cycle of planning can also delay sharing something useful.
Show your judgment alongside your process. Explain the constraints, options you rejected, disagreements, and decisions that made your work specific.
Make your contribution understandable. Give the team credit and explain what you owned, influenced, or learned. A reader should be able to recognize your role.
Choose evidence that fits the project. Different projects produce different outcomes and proof. A fixed case study formula can hide the most meaningful work.
Let action come before complete confidence. Feeling unprepared does not automatically mean you are incapable. The next step can still be worth taking.
Show notes
The rejection that stayed with me
Years ago, I interviewed for a senior UX role at a boutique agency. I was a mid-level designer, so I knew it was a stretch. What stayed with me was the feedback: my portfolio wasn’t communicating at the same level as the senior designers they were considering.
I had included the things a UX case study was supposed to include. Research, wireframes, designs, solutions, results. Looking back, the missing part was how I actually worked. The portfolio showed a process without much uncertainty, disagreement, or judgment.
Give readers something specific to understand
Knowing the fundamentals becomes an expectation as you gain experience. What helps someone understand you is what happened when the work was difficult. What did the research contradict? What did engineering push back on? Which option did you decide against? What changed after you realized you were wrong?
Those details make your decisions believable. They help a reader recognize the kind of work you are equipped to do. You don’t need to make an argument that every company should hire you. You need to make your strongest fit easier to recognize.
Why I’m building UX Growth Portfolios
I kept hearing from designers whose experience was stronger than the story their portfolio told. A difficult decision could get reduced to one sentence. Useful constraints could disappear because they felt too messy to include.
UX Growth Portfolios grew out of that problem. In the episode, I introduce the DIY Portfolio Strategy Kit, First Impression Rewrite, and deeper portfolio rewrites. The work focuses on positioning, writing, decisions, and ownership. The question behind it is still the same: how can a portfolio represent the level of the designer behind it?
What my dad taught me about getting on with it
I’m a planner. I can research a problem, build a system, and then build another system to improve the first one. My dad was a doer. If something needed to happen, he handled it.
After he died, there were responsibilities I didn’t feel ready to take on. There wasn’t a moment when life waited for me to feel confident. I had to figure things out. His support for this podcast, even without understanding every part of UX, is something I’ll carry with me.
That also changed how I think about waiting to tell people what they mean to me. Another conversation or a better moment may come, but it isn’t guaranteed.
Season 6 starts here
I could keep improving this episode. I could keep researching portfolios. There will always be another version. At some point, that becomes another way of hiding.
Season 6 brings conversations about research, leadership, AI, hiring, and career development. I still have a lot to learn, and I still believe these conversations can help designers move forward. I’m happy to be back.
Full transcript
Edited for readability. Obvious transcription errors and repeated starts have been corrected while preserving the spoken meaning. This text is not a verbatim quotation.
Expand a section below to read. Each section can be opened and closed independently.
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Season six of the UX Growth Podcast was supposed to come out a while ago. For a long time, the reason it hadn’t was honestly pretty normal. I was working, and actually obsessing over something is probably more accurate. I’ve spent the last few years becoming increasingly fascinated with UX portfolios. Why some portfolios can make a designer immediately feel credible. Why others can make genuinely great work feel completely forgettable. Why talented designers can struggle to get interviews. And why so much portfolio advice seems to produce case studies that all look and sound the same. I kept telling myself these things: I need to finish this. I need to improve that. I just need a little more time. Then my dad died, and suddenly the whole idea of waiting until I was ready started to mean what I’ve actually learned it should mean. One of the biggest things my dad taught me, whether he realized he was teaching me or not, was something I’m naturally terrible at: sometimes you just need to do the thing. You might not feel prepared. You might not know exactly what you’re doing. You might wish you had another week, another year, another conversation. But sometimes the responsibility arrives before the confidence does, and you have to move anyway. So this episode is about where I’ve been. It’s about what I’ve been building. And it’s also about my dad. That’s why I’m finally ready to say what I’ve wanted to say for a while now. The UX Growth Podcast is back, and season six is here. Hi, this is the UX Growth Podcast, the podcast that helps people learn and grow in the UX design industry. I’m your host, Nick Mann. And yeah, it’s been a while. The good news is that I’ve already recorded a lot of season six. I’m genuinely really excited about what you’re going to hear. I’ve had conversations with people from places like NASA and HBO Max. I’ve talked with people studying careers and what actually helps people grow. I’ve gotten into UX research, leadership, AI, career development, hiring, and a bunch of ideas that I honestly do not hear discussed very often on UX podcasts. I think those conversations matter more than ever right now because this is a really strange time to be in UX. AI is changing the industry. Layoffs are still happening. People trying to get into UX are wondering how they’re supposed to compete. People who have been doing this for years are asking how they stay valuable. All these rules that we’ve learned and tried to follow don’t feel as stable as they used to be. There’s this question we try to ask ourselves: what does growth even look like now? I think that’s one of the reasons I still love making this podcast. It’s what season six is about. I’m still going, and nothing is really going to stop me. I still feel like there are people in this industry who know things that other designers need to hear. Sometimes that’s a very practical lesson. Sometimes it’s somebody explaining what hiring actually looks like from the other side. Maybe it’s somebody talking about a mistake they made fifteen years ago. But it’s also hearing a completely different perspective and realizing that you’ve been thinking about something the wrong way. It’s when you hear someone say, “Yeah, I’ve been struggling with this too.” That’s always been what the UX Growth Podcast has meant to me. Not just talking about design, but helping people actually learn and grow in this field.
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Weirdly enough, making this podcast also helped me answer a question that has been bothering me for years. That question started with a rejection. Years ago, I interviewed for a senior UX design position at a boutique agency. I wasn’t a senior-level designer. I was mid-level, so I knew I was reaching. But getting far enough to speak with a recruiter actually felt like a win. Eventually, I got another phone call, and they weren’t moving forward with me. That wasn’t particularly surprising, but the reason confused me. The recruiter told me that my portfolio wasn’t at the same level as the other senior designers they were considering. I remember thinking, “What does that mean?” Because I thought my portfolio was good. Actually, I thought it looked almost exactly like what a good UX portfolio was supposed to look like. It had a problem, the research, the process, the wireframes, designs, the solutions, and of course, the results. After looking at a lot of other UX portfolios, I realized I was doing the same thing everyone else was doing. So if I was doing everything that a good UX designer was supposed to do, then what were those senior designers communicating that I wasn’t? That question really bothered me, and I’ve basically been trying to answer it ever since. When I look at that old portfolio now, it feels hollow. That’s interesting because I don’t think it was a bad portfolio. It had everything you would expect from a professional-level presentation of the UX process. But it didn’t show how I worked. There wasn’t much uncertainty. There weren’t many bad options. There weren’t these constraints. There weren’t even any disagreements. Looking at it, I thought, “Man, I didn’t talk about any mistakes I had.” I wasn’t talking about any of the things that actual professional design work is full of because I didn’t think those were the things I was supposed to show. I thought portfolios were supposed to prove that I knew how UX worked. It turns out they’re looking at more than just portfolios. I started talking with more designers about that. I started having conversations with hiring managers, recruiters, design leaders, everyone regarding the hiring process, as you’ve probably heard on the UX Growth Podcast over the years. I kept seeing the same problem. Different designers, different companies, and different projects, but similar stories about how the portfolios were presenting themselves. What happens when everyone follows the same UX portfolio best practices? Eventually, everyone just looks the same.
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That’s probably the biggest change in how portfolios need to be now. Showing the UX process is not the same thing as showing how you actually work. A hiring manager probably doesn’t need five paragraphs proving that you know user interviews exist. Especially as you become more experienced, knowing these fundamentals is to be expected. What becomes more interesting is less about the process and more about what part of the process you actually owned yourself. What did your research contradict about other expectations? What options did you consider and ultimately not do? What constraints did you encounter? Was there anything the engineering team pushed back on? Did you disagree with anyone on the team? What do you do when you realize you were wrong? That’s where design judgment really matters. Being right when everyone knows the answer isn’t really impressive. A lot of the portfolios hiring managers look at are just obvious. It can feel like a waste of time because they’re not learning about you, the designer, the professional, the one who makes decisions. You can be a completely reasonable designer and still not have things work out. I think there’s a level of fear around that. It doesn’t automatically make you a bad designer. What really matters is what you do next. That’s when I considered that portfolios are persuasion. You’re making an argument: this is the kind of designer you are. This is how you think. These are the things you’re good at. This is how you handle difficult situations. And here is evidence that you’re believable, that this isn’t just made up. The goal really isn’t to convince every company that they should hire you to solve their UX problems, because you can’t. The goal is to make your strongest fit easier to recognize. I really want to make that clear. The goal shouldn’t necessarily be to make your work look more like a good UX case study. The goal should be to make it more like your actual work. That’s why this has been such a huge part of my time between season five and this season. I’ve gotten to the point where I feel confident in this problem. I feel like I’ve discovered a lot of the reasons designers are getting it wrong, why designers need to prove different things, and how evidence and storytelling fit into that. As much as so many designers want to say storytelling is a big factor in how we write good portfolios, I think there are a lot of misconceptions about that as well. Sometimes storytelling can become its own structured process. Designers can follow that to an absolute T for every project when that doesn’t really feel good enough. You can have different metrics and different evidence. Portfolio strategy is contextual. It’s not something where you can develop a strong belief in a template and naturally fit everything into it. Nothing is contributed at the exact same level and in the same way for every project. Those constraints, all the emotions that factor into what you’re doing, and the structure of the portfolio can become overwhelming. You’re realizing that the work you’re doing is better than what you’re presenting in the portfolio. That’s a lot of frustration. That’s a reason a lot of designers aren’t getting interviews. I don’t want to say it’s the only reason, of course, but it’s a big factor. The most difficult decision or project gets reduced to one sentence. These interesting constraints get deleted because we overthink them. We think people don’t care, or we feel like it puts us in a bad light. For example, how many designers say “we” in their case studies? It’s something they learned the hard way to remove because it doesn’t make the project look successful enough, or it feels like their contributions didn’t really matter. If you want to get to the next part of your career, it’s important to be good at solving problems. But you also need to be better at demonstrating your ideas and what you actually did in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re putting yourself in a horrible light.
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That’s the reason I’m launching UX Growth Portfolios. This is a different way of approaching strategy and writing. There are different levels to how I’m going about it. There’s a do-it-yourself Portfolio Strategy Kit that I’ve made for people who want to know the system and work on it themselves. There’s also a First Impression Rewrite, focusing on what somebody understands when they first land on your portfolio. Then there are deeper portfolio rewrites, where I help with positioning, case studies, writing, and how your decisions and ownership come across. This question started with my interest in what makes a portfolio actually represent the level of the designer behind it. I have a much better understanding of that today than when I got that rejection call. But I’m definitely not finished with that question, and that’s kind of the point. If you’ve ever looked at your own portfolio and thought, “I know I’m better than this thing makes me look,” that’s exactly the problem I’m trying to solve. You can find UX Growth Portfolios on the UX Growth website, theuxgrowth.com. The link is also directly in the show notes.
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There’s another reason this season took so long, and this part is harder to talk about: my dad passing away. When that happened, a lot of things stopped mattering for a while. There were things my family had to deal with. There were responsibilities that needed to be handled, and things my dad took care of that I really needed to think about. He handled a lot of things that no one else did. A lot of the time, now that someone has to be me. I don’t really feel ready for that. I still don’t. One of the strange things about losing a parent is that nobody waits until you’re ready to hand you their responsibilities. Life doesn’t say, “Okay, Nick, you studied enough. You practiced all you can. You completed that tutorial. You’re ready now. You can do it.” It just happens, and you have to figure it out. My dad and I were very different people. I’m a planner. I can think about something forever. I can research it. I can build a system. I can optimize that system, and then build another system to improve the first system. Eventually, I have a very impressive plan for doing something I still haven’t done. My dad was a doer. If something needed to happen, he handled it. He got things done. I think one of the things he spent his entire life trying to teach me was that actions don’t always wait for confidence. Sometimes you don’t know exactly what you’re doing. Sometimes you don’t feel ready. Sometimes there isn’t enough information. You still have to move. He didn’t know every detail of what I was building with UX Growth Portfolios, but he knew I wanted to turn the UX Growth Podcast into something I could eventually do full-time. He was so proud of that. He was proud of this podcast and everything I was doing. He didn’t know much about UX or the tech industry. I could explain product strategy for twenty minutes, and he’d still be wondering what I was talking about. But he listened to the podcast anyway because I made it, and he loved me. He was so proud that I was doing something to help people. I think that’s something I’m going to remember for the rest of my life. He didn’t understand every part of everything, but he cared enough that I was doing it. Losing him also changed the way I think about something I’ve struggled with for a long time: how many times I push things off until later.
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There have been so many times when I’ve thought, “I’ll do it when I feel better about it. I’ll do it when I feel ready. I’ll publish something when it feels perfect.” Waiting isn’t always the right decision. I’m not saying that every impulse needs to become an immediate action. But I do think we massively overestimate how often later will become this magical moment when everything suddenly feels right. If something matters to you, tell them. If someone helped you, tell them. If you’re proud of someone, tell them. If you love somebody, tell them. If there’s something meaningful you keep thinking you’ll say eventually, maybe eventually doesn’t need to be the goal. I’ve never really heard someone look backward and say, “I’m so glad I waited another six months to tell that person what they meant to me.” It’s always the opposite. We assume we’ll have another opportunity. Another year with that person, another weekend, another phone call, or even just a better moment. Most of the time, you probably will, but that’s never guaranteed. Sometimes later is just later. One of the biggest things I’ve learned from everything that’s happened is that just because you’re not ready doesn’t mean you’re incapable. And just because the timing isn’t perfect doesn’t mean the timing is wrong.
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Which brings me back to season six. Could these episodes be better if I spent another month working on them? Most likely. Could I spend another year researching UX portfolios? Oh yeah, absolutely. Could I keep changing a lot of things I think I could improve on? Yes, I could re-record this episode because I pronounced something weird. Honestly, I’ve already done that twice. But there’s always going to be a better version. There’s always going to be another improvement. What I really want to say is that this can be another form of procrastination. Another form of hiding. My dad would probably have told me to stop screwing around and get on with it. So I’m getting on with it. Season six of the UX Growth Podcast is here. UX Growth Portfolios is here. I’ve got conversations coming that I’m genuinely excited for you to hear. I’ve got a lot more to learn about portfolios. I’ve got a lot more to learn about this industry. After these six seasons, I still really want to do this. I still believe there are conversations worth having. There are so many designers whose careers can change because someone finally explained something that worked for them. I don’t know what the future will hold for the UX industry or the UX Growth Podcast. For me, I know I’m not ready for everything that’s coming next, but I don’t think being ready was ever the point. Sometimes you just have to do the thing that’s in front of you. So that’s what I’m doing. I wish my dad was still here. I wish he could still hear this. I know he’d be proud that I finally got this out. Thank you for listening. Thank you for sticking around. I’m really happy to be back. Welcome to season six of the UX Growth Podcast.
Resources and links
UX Growth Portfolios: explore the portfolio strategy and writing help introduced in this episode.
The UX Growth Podcast episode archive: find more conversations about design, hiring, and career growth.
Keep listening
Two conversations that connect with the portfolio lessons and the return for Season 6.
Season 5 · Episode 8: Sarah Doody
A practical conversation about portfolio clarity, senior-level evidence, the 10% better mindset, and treating the job search as a UX experiment.
Season 5 Finale
A reflection on portfolio clarity, the limits of spreading yourself too thin, and the direction that leads into Season 6.
Keep learning. Keep moving.
If this episode gave you something to think about, there are more conversations waiting in the archive. Follow the podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to hear what comes next.
If your portfolio isn’t communicating the work you know you can do, explore UX Growth Portfolios.
