Latest / The Promotion Memo with Fexingo: Getting Visibility, Sponsors, and Executive Presence / How an Employee Got Promoted by Creating a Career Portfolio Website
Transcript
- Lucas: So, you’re a mid-level product manager. You’ve been shipping features for three years. Your boss likes you. But the senior director three levels up has no idea who you are. How do you get on their radar without being pushy? Luna: You build a career portfolio website. Lucas: Exactly. That’s the move we’re talking about today. A product manager I’ll call Jen — not her real name — was stuck at the senior associate level at a mid-sized SaaS company. She was doing great work, but she was invisible outside her immediate team. So she built a simple portfolio site on her own domain. Luna: What did she put on it? Lucas: Three main sections. First, a project showcase. For each project she led, she wrote a two-paragraph case study — the problem, her approach, the outcome. And she always led with a number. Not 'improved user experience.' Something like 'reduced checkout abandonment by 18 percent, worth an estimated $1.2 million in recovered revenue annually.' Luna: That’s concrete. Second section? Lucas: Testimonials. She asked three stakeholders — her engineering lead, her design partner, and the VP of product she’d worked with on a cross-functional initiative — to each write a paragraph about working with her. She posted them with their permission, full names, and titles. Luna: That’s essentially third-party validation. Very different from listing skills on a resume. Lucas: Right. The third section was a blog. She committed to writing one post per month. Not long essays — 500 words max. Topics like 'How we used feature flags to de-risk a pricing experiment' or 'Three things I learned from our failed personalization launch.' It showed she could reflect and teach. Luna: And she hosted this on her own domain? Lucas: Yeah. FirstnameLastname dot com. Cost her twelve bucks a year. She built it on Carrd — no coding. Took her a weekend. Luna: But here’s the pushback I always hear: 'That’s a lot of time to maintain something that might not get seen.' How do you make sure people actually look at it? Lucas: She didn’t blast it to the company. She used it strategically. When she submitted her self-evaluation for the mid-year review, she included a link at the bottom: 'For more detail on my project impact, see my portfolio at…' Her manager clicked. Her manager’s manager clicked. Then, when the VP of product was looking for someone to lead a new initiative, her manager forwarded the link. Luna: So it became a living document that people could reference. Not just a PDF that sits in a folder. Lucas: Exactly. And that’s the key difference between a portfolio site and a traditional brag doc or a resume. A brag doc is static — you send it once and it’s gone. A portfolio site is always live, always updated, and you can share it in a meeting, in a Slack thread, in your email signature. It’s always working for you. Luna: Speak of a Slack thread — there’s a company channel where people share wins. Did she leverage that? Lucas: She did. When she launched a feature that got positive customer feedback, she posted in the #wins channel with a one-sentence summary and the link to her case study. Not every week. Maybe once a quarter. But it kept her name in front of people who weren’t on her team. Luna: And this eventually led to the promotion? Lucas: That and a sponsorship. Her VP saw the portfolio, noticed she could communicate impact clearly, and pulled her into a high-visibility project. Six months later, she was promoted to senior product manager. Luna: Look, I want to pause here because something just struck me. We talk a lot on this show about building visibility, but we never mention that we deliberately don't run ads on these episodes. If you've gotten value from any of our career tactics — like the portfolio website idea — and you want to support the show staying ad-free, the link is buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a small way to keep this content independent. Lucas: Yeah, exactly. That support is what keeps us from having to sell your attention to someone else. And it's entirely optional. Now, back to Jen's story — the VP told her later that the portfolio was what made her stand out from three other candidates who had similar experience but no visible body of work. Luna: So the portfolio acted as a tiebreaker. It showed she was serious about her craft. Lucas: Exactly. And it’s not just for product managers. I’ve seen designers, marketers, even an operations analyst use this approach. The format adapts. For the ops analyst, instead of product case studies, she had process improvement stories — 'Reduced invoice processing time by 40 percent by automating three manual steps.' Same structure. Luna: What about people who aren’t comfortable writing? Or who don’t have design skills? Lucas: You don’t need design skills. Use a template. Carrd, Notion, even a public Google Site works. Write in short paragraphs. Bullet points. And for the writing part — it’s a skill you can build. Start with bullet points, then turn them into sentences. You’re not trying to win a Pulitzer. You’re just trying to be clear. Luna: One thing I’d add: don’t overthink the domain. First name last name dot com is ideal. If that’s taken, add a middle initial or your industry — like jen smith product dot com. Lucas: Good call. And keep the URL simple enough to say out loud in a conversation. Jen’s was just jen dash smith dot com. Easy. Now, once the site is live, the next step is to treat it like a product. That means you update it regularly. Set a calendar reminder: every quarter, spend an hour reviewing your projects. Remove old ones that aren’t relevant. Add new ones. Freshen up the testimonials. Luna: And track the data. Most platforms give you basic analytics — how many visits, where they came from. If you see the VP’s IP visiting your site repeatedly, that’s a signal. Lucas: Which brings up a subtle point: use the analytics to inform your strategy. If you notice that people are clicking most on a particular case study, maybe that’s the project you should talk about in your next one-on-one. The portfolio becomes a feedback loop. Luna: Let’s talk about the blog section more. Because I think that’s where a lot of people get stuck. They feel like they need to be an expert to write. Lucas: You don’t. Write about what you’re learning. Jen’s first blog post was literally 'What I learned from my first A/B test that failed.' It was honest, short, and useful. People relate to vulnerability more than perfection. And it signals that you’re reflective — which is a trait senior leaders look for. Luna: How many posts did she have before the promotion? Lucas: Six. Over six months. One per month. That’s not overwhelming. And she didn’t promote every post. She just shared the ones she thought were most relevant in her Slack channel. Luna: I think the key takeaway is that a portfolio website is a tool for signaling — not just a repository. It signals that you’re organized, that you care about your career, and that you can communicate impact. Lucas: Right. And in a remote or hybrid environment, where water-cooler moments don’t happen, it’s even more important. Your portfolio is your digital presence. It works while you sleep. Luna: So if someone listening wants to start this week, what’s the first step? Lucas: Buy a domain. Pick a platform. Then write down three projects you’re proud of. For each, write three sentences: the problem, your role, the result with a number. That’s your starting point. You can polish later. Luna: And if you’re not sure a portfolio is worth the effort, just think of Jen. Six months from invisible to promoted. That’s a pretty good return on a weekend. Lucas: Exactly. It’s not a silver bullet, but it’s a force multiplier. It makes every other visibility tactic you use — brag docs, sponsorship memos, career playbooks — more effective because there’s a central hub that ties it all together. Luna: Alright, so to recap: build a simple site, showcase projects with metrics, collect testimonials, write a short monthly blog, and share it strategically. That’s the playbook. Lucas: That’s it. And if you want to see an example, we’ll link to some templates in the show notes. But honestly, the best example is the one you build yourself.