Designing my portfolio like a product

TL;DR

Where I started. My old portfolio was technically impressive (hand-coded SCSS, perfect Lighthouse score) but weak where it mattered most: storytelling. The content structure was too rigid to fix without starting over.

What I did. Treated the rebuild as a product brief: mapped the audience, set deliberate constraints, and built a flexible content system that could scale.

What changed. A portfolio that works as a product. Fast, considered at every breakpoint, and shaped by a clear sense of who it's for. New case studies can land without touching the codebase.

Map who's coming before deciding what to build.

Before any visual decisions, I mapped everyone who might land on the site against two axes: browsing vs evaluating, aesthetics vs information. Friends, recruiters, fellow designers, hiring managers, conference organisers. The exercise made the priority obvious. The people who matter most cluster in the evaluating-information corner. They want evidence and substance.

Each case study can be a different shape without each one being a custom build.

The real engineering went into the case studies. I wanted to tell different stories in different shapes without each one being a custom build. Strapi's Dynamic Zones let me drop charts, comparison sliders, carousels, or just text blocks into any case study, in any order. The content dictates the layout, not the other way around.

Treating a portfolio like a product made it a much stronger piece of work than just making it look nice.

That meant audience research, deliberate constraints, and a content system that scales. It also closed the design-to-dev gap that most portfolios advertise but few demonstrate. The site is the case study.