AI Lab
Challenge
Leadership portfolios are a different problem from IC portfolios. A Director or VP has to show org design, hiring, strategy, and outcomes they influenced rather than shipped, and most of it sits under NDA. Yet every portfolio gallery on the internet is a wall of Dribbble shots and junior case studies. When a design leader wants to see how a peer presents themselves, they end up on LinkedIn and a handful of Medium posts. I wanted to see if I could build and curate a gallery in a single afternoon.
Strategy
I treated Claude as a thought partner first and a build tool second. We stress-tested the idea before writing code: whether the inventory existed (it did, but was thin, which pushed the design toward a small curated set with real annotation rather than a big grid), whether it should carry my name (yes, because judgment is only credible if you know who's judging), and what the smallest shippable version was. Claude then researched and verified thirty live portfolios across Manager, Director, VP, Principal, Founder, and Executive levels, and drafted a four-part annotation for each. I edited every note, cut the ones I didn't agree with, and wrote my own entry to set the bar. The site itself is Next.js and Tailwind on Vercel with a single JSON file as the CMS.
Results
Leadership Folios went from idea to website in about 4 hours, with 27 annotated entries at launch and a submission pipeline to source the next batch. The research surfaced a finding worth a project on its own: almost no one at the Manager level has a public portfolio, and sitting executives almost never do; the leaders who publish are Directors, VPs, and founders. Beyond the site, the project was a test of a working pattern I now use by default: use the AI model to expand my thinking before building with it, keep the initial spec small enough to ship fast, and let the live site (not the mockup) be the thing you critique and iterate on.