Who this is for
You need to show someone what you can do — for a job, a client, a career change, a rate increase — and what you currently have is a CV, some job titles, and a vague sense that your actual work is not visible anywhere.
This template treats a portfolio as an evidence problem, not a design problem. The most common failure is spending weeks on the presentation layer of a portfolio that contains two weak pieces, because the site is tractable and the work is not.
The branches
Who this is for and what they need to believe. A portfolio aimed at everyone convinces nobody. One audience — a hiring manager in a specific field, a particular kind of client — and one thing they need to believe about you. This branch governs every selection decision downstream and is the one most people skip entirely.
What I already have that counts. Almost everyone underestimates this. Work done in a job, things built for yourself, problems solved for friends, internal tools nobody outside saw. Much of it needs permission or anonymising rather than rebuilding. Sub-branches: what exists; what needs sanitising before it can be shown; what I would need to ask about.
The gap between what I have and what they need to believe. Do the comparison explicitly. Usually one or two specific capabilities have no evidence at all, and those — not a portfolio site — are what to build next.
One piece built to close the biggest gap. Deliberately singular. One strong piece that demonstrates the thing they doubt beats four that demonstrate what they already assume. This branch usually holds most of the actual work.
How each piece is explained. The artifact alone rarely lands. What was the problem, what did you decide, what did you reject, what would you do differently? This reasoning is what distinguishes someone who did the work from someone who was nearby, and it is frequently more persuasive than the artifact.
Where it lives and how it is reached. The presentation layer, deliberately last and deliberately small. A plain page with three well-explained pieces outperforms an elaborate site with placeholders. Sub-branches: where it is hosted; how someone gets to it from where they already are.
How to use it
Import it and mark "who this is for" as Focus. It takes ten minutes and it changes every subsequent decision, including which existing work is worth including at all.
Then work the "what I already have" branch before building anything new. People routinely start a fresh project while sitting on three years of unshowcased work that only needed permission and a paragraph of context.
Draw the dependency from the gap branch to the build branch — building before identifying the gap is the most common way portfolio effort gets misallocated.
What to add once it is yours
Name the actual audience, the actual pieces, the actual gap. Delete branches that do not apply; a portfolio map with six unfilled sections is worse than one with three real ones.
Attach Proof as pieces reach a showable state — the link, the file, the write-up. A branch cannot be marked Proven without it, which here prevents the common state of considering a piece "basically done" for four months.
Signs it is working
- You can name the one thing your audience needs to believe
- Something old got resurrected rather than everything being built new
- Each piece has an explanation, not just an artifact
- The presentation layer took less time than the work in it
Signs it is not
- The site design has consumed more effort than the pieces
- The portfolio is aimed at everyone
- You are building a new project while old work sits unshown
- Three pieces are 80% done and none is shareable