I have been curious about trying the method described in the book Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days, by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Braden Kowitz, for a while. The first time I tried, it was a failure. My team was trying to build an app in 12 weeks for our post-degree diploma. Our schedules didn’t match, and none of us had the energy or the knowledge to apply the method. The next term, there was another failed attempt, but at least I tried to incorporate some of the activities. In our last project, I was already tired and just used common sense because I didn’t want to stress my team more than they already were.

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This year, I found myself stuck trying to complete my UX design portfolio. ‘Stuck’ is just a polite word; it was worse than that. I tried different methods I knew, and my favorite of breaking the website into pages rather than sections and trying to build it by creating very tiny, tiny, tiny tasks I could accomplish, but something was still missing. I reminded myself that while reading the book, they mentioned they used it to build Blue Bottle Coffee’s first e-commerce website, and I thought this could work for a portfolio too. The only thing is, I was by myself, aside from the remote support from some very good friends. Anyway, I decided to give it a try, ridiculous as it may seem.

I’m not going to describe the whole process here — you can read the book if you want to understand it in depth. But it resulted in my room looking like the meme of Charlie Day in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, according to my partner. It was as if I were trying to track a criminal, and the criminal was probably my perfectionism or something like that. Here are a couple of pictures of what my room looked like:

What my room looked like:

In the beginning, it was good — the ideas flowed, and the structure provided by the book helped. The issue was when each specialist came into action. I was pretending to be different versions of myself just to create a portfolio. The good thing is, I am an engineer, so pretending to be another type of professional was easy up to a certain point because I am a person of numbers, art, and emotions.

I’m sorry to tell you that the sprint did not solve my problems. Although I created some nice solutions, the crises remained. I soon started to realize, while talking to other professionals, that everyone is unhappy with their portfolios — at least the people I talked to. I believe it’s because, at the same time, we want to show everything we can do, but also be specific enough to catch the attention of whoever is recruiting for the specific job opening we’re applying to. I’m not going to solve the ‘portfolio conundrum,’ but at least, after some crises and crying, I have a first version I can start to show people.

Here it is: https://rafaelajung.com/ If you want to give me feedback, be gentle; I am still recovering from the crisis.