Why I Stopped Trusting Portfolios (And Started Trusting Speed)
Seven years as a designer taught me one thing about hiring: a beautiful portfolio means almost nothing.
I've met designers with stunning case studies who couldn't deliver under pressure. And I've met scrappy generalists with messy Figma files who shipped faster than entire teams.
Back in 2018, I wrote about lessons from freelancing. One of them was "don't trust people, trust signed agreements." I still believe that. But now I'd add something: don't trust portfolios, trust demonstrations.
Here's what changed.
AI made portfolios unreliable
Anyone can use Midjourney to generate a mood board. Anyone can use Claude to write a perfect case study narrative. Anyone can use Figma's AI features to auto-layout a prototype that looks clean. The visual bar has been raised so high that "looking good" is no longer a signal of skill. It's a signal of access.
So what do I look at now?
Speed of execution. Give someone a real problem on Monday. See what they come back with on Wednesday. Not the final polish. The thinking. The decision-making. The tradeoffs they made and why.
I once tested an AI coding tool by giving it a messy, half-broken codebase. Not a clean tutorial project. A real disaster. The way it handled ambiguity told me more than any demo ever could. I apply the same logic to people.
When I was freelancing in my 20s, I learned the hard way that clients pick the option you hate most. So I started only showing work I was proud of. That was a survival skill back then. Today the equivalent survival skill is this: only hire people who can show you their process under constraints. Not their best work in ideal conditions.
The portfolio era rewarded polish. The AI era rewards adaptability.
A duck who ships beats a specialist who perfects.
If you're building a team, stop scrolling portfolios. Start giving tests. Real problems, tight deadlines, messy requirements. The people who thrive in chaos are the ones worth keeping.
And if you're a freelancer reading this? Stop polishing your Behance. Start documenting your speed. Screenshot your 2-hour prototype. Record your screen while you build. Show the mess, the iteration, the "it broke but I fixed it" moment.
That's your new portfolio.