What is a portfolio case study?

The short definition

In a portfolio, a case study is the story behind one portfolio project. Screenshots show what you made. The case study shows how you think: what you were trying to solve, the options you weighed, what you chose and what it led to.

The term comes from design portfolios, where it is the norm, but developers, data people and product managers use the same format.

The usual structure

Nielsen Norman Group, after surveying 204 UX hiring managers, suggests a case study cover:

1. the problem or hypothesis
2. your specific role, and how you collaborated
3. how you arrived at the solution
4. how the solution solved the problem
5. challenges, including ideas you dropped
6. the effect on users and the business
7. what you learned

For a developer, swap in technical detail: the architecture, a hard bug, a performance number, a trade-off you would revisit.

Common mistakes

• A wall of text. Reviewers skim. Use headings, short paragraphs and captioned images.
• Only the final result. Hiring managers want some of the messy middle: sketches, iterations, the version that did not work.
• "We" all the way through. Credit the team, then say exactly what you did.
• No outcome. Even without metrics, say what changed: it shipped, people used it, you learned X.

A step-by-step guide is in how to write a project case study that gets you hired.

On makerhandle

Every project on makerhandle has its own page that works as a case study: a Markdown write-up with headings, a gallery of up to 12 captioned images, your role and timeline, the stack, one-line highlights for outcomes and links to the live product and source. It is free for five projects. See makerhandle for designers.