If you feel the market shifting under your feet, you are not alone. Titles are changing, teams are leaner, and expectations are higher. Tools help, but tools are not the story. Your value is.
What hiring managers actually look for now
Outcomes over outputs. Show the business result, not just the interface.
Product sense. Explain trade-offs, constraints, and why your decision was right for the moment.
Influence. How you aligned stakeholders, unblocked engineers, and moved the team forward.
Evidence. Research that changed a decision, a test that saved time, a metric that improved.
Make your work easy to believe
Replace “Designed a new dashboard” with “Reduced reporting time by 30% after launch.”
Replace “Ran 10 interviews” with “Interviews revealed one blocker, we removed it, conversion improved.”
Replace “Built a design system” with “Cut time-to-ship from 3 weeks to 5 days for common flows.”
Quick self-audit for your portfolio
Can a stranger see your impact in 10 seconds?
Do your case studies name the problem, the constraint, and the outcome?
Does each project end with what you learned and what you would do next?
Spaces like UXCON25 exist for this reason, to swap real stories and leave with playbooks you can use on Monday. Thanks to support from Great Question, getting in the room is more accessible this year, without losing the value that matters.
Since our community grows by sharing
We want to hear from you. Add your voice to the skills, stories, and lessons shaping UX today and you’ll stand a chance to win a ticket to UXCON25.
How to participate
Post on LinkedIn with #UXCON25.
Share what excites you most about the conference
We will feature thoughtful posts in our feed, and a few people will receive a free ticket to UXCON25.
Ready to be part of it?