Portfolios from design leaders, annotated.
Leadership Folios collects portfolios from UX Managers, Directors, VPs, Founders and Executives. Every entry comes with notes on why it works at that level and what you can take from it.
Chosen for what they led, not only what they made. How portfolios are chosen →
VPFounderIndependent
Aarron Walter
Co-founder, Design Better
Work organized by role and tenure, not by artifact.
DirectorBig Tech
Aastha Gaur
Sr. Director, UX at Google
No case studies. A leadership philosophy and a management curriculum instead.
DirectorStartup
Andrés Clavijo
Director of UX at Hourly
Design operations presented as leadership case studies.
FounderAgency
Andy Budd
Founder, Clearleft, UX London and Leading Design
Agency founder to advisor, with the companies he built as the credentials.
ManagerPrincipalBig TechCurator
Ben Roach
Senior Staff UX Manager at Google
Leads with numbers that prove leverage, not craft.
PrincipalStartup
Buzz Usborne
Principal Designer at Help Scout
The reference Principal portfolio: hands-on, framed around leverage.
DirectorBig Tech
Cap Watkins
Platform Design Director at QuickBooks (Intuit)
The anti-portfolio: five paragraphs and a blog.
DirectorIndependent
Chelsea Watson
UX Design Leader & Strategist
Every case study written in the leader's voice.
FounderAgency
Dan Mall
Founder, SuperFriendly
A founder's site organized by what he teaches, not what he made.
DirectorIndependent
Harrison Wheeler
Founder, LeadCraft
Case studies where the org chart is the deliverable.
FounderAgency
Jeffrey Zeldman
Founder, Happy Cog, A List Apart and An Event Apart at Automattic
Thirty years of publishing under one name is the portfolio.
ExecutiveEnterprise
Jehad Affoneh
Chief Design Officer at Toast
A working CDO's site is a newsletter with a bio attached.
VPStartup
Joel Califa
VP Design at Unify
A career told as a timeline, with leadership as its own case study.
DirectorStartup
Josh Taylor
Head of Design, Hedra
Growth-stage leadership told as one story: 5 designers to 40.
FounderStartup
Julie Zhuo
Founder, Sundial
The hub model: one page pointing at a body of work that lives elsewhere.
DirectorIndependent
Marissa Louie
Head of Product and UX Design (consulting)
Leadership case studies filed next to product case studies, on purpose.
VPIndependent
Matthew Holloway
Fractional Design Leader & Executive Coach
The post-executive site: selling leadership itself, not seeking a role.
ExecutiveBig Tech
Mike Davidson
Design Executive leading the largest design team at Microsoft AI
An executive's site that is entirely essays, and the essays are the argument.
FounderIndependent
Peter Merholz
Co-founder, Adaptive Path
The book became the practice, and the site sells the practice.
ExecutiveIndependent
Rachel Kobe
Chief Design Executive
The C-suite version: a thesis, a writing practice, an advisory offer.
DirectorEnterprise
Rakesh Patwari
Experience design leader at Walmart
Every case study plotted by the kind of leadership it took.
FounderIndependent
Ryan Rumsey
Founder, Second Wave Dive and CDO School
Multiple brands for multiple audiences, run by one former exec.
VPEnterprise
Sandeep Datar
VP, User Experience and Design
What a VP portfolio looks like when the work can't be shown.
FounderEnterprise
Scott Belsky
Partner, A24 and founder, A24 Labs
One thesis on the homepage, and everything else supports it.
DirectorEnterprise
Tanner Christensen
Leads software design for autonomy and design systems at Anduril
The zero-to-one design org, written as a case study.
DirectorBig Tech
Tizzy Asher
Leads product and content design for AI Wearables, Reality Labs at Meta
A Director on a template platform, and it works.
FounderStartup
Tobias van Schneider
Founder and Creative Director, HOVS
Founder credit attached to every project, so the ventures read as work.