I spent nine years at Amazon. I have a LinkedIn profile with the right keywords. I have a resume that lists metrics people find impressive. And for a long time, I thought that was enough.
It is not.
The problem with resumes
A resume is a list. A compressed, backward-looking list of things you did, stripped of context, reasoning, and judgment. It answers one question: what were you involved in?
It does not answer the question that actually matters to anyone hiring for a senior role: how do you think?
You can have a resume that says "led analytics for a $2.5B initiative" and tell an interviewer absolutely nothing about whether you understood the problem, made the right tradeoffs, or would know what to do in a different context. Credentials accumulate. Thinking is invisible - unless you make it visible.
A portfolio makes it visible.
What LinkedIn actually is
LinkedIn is an activity feed with a profile attached. It is great for reach. It is terrible for depth.
When you post something on LinkedIn - a take, a breakdown, a project - it lives in someone's feed for 48 hours and disappears. There is no permanent URL. There is no way to find it six months later unless you scroll through your own posts. The algorithm decides what gets seen and when.
I use LinkedIn. It is genuinely useful for distribution. But it is not a portfolio. It is a billboard on a road where traffic moves in one direction and never comes back.
Your website is different. It is persistent. It is searchable. It is yours.
The compounding effect of a permanent URL
Every piece of writing, every project page, every "here is how I approach this problem" section on your website is indexed. It accumulates. Six months from now, someone searching for analytics leadership or AI product thinking in your domain can find it.
A link you share in an email to a recruiter goes somewhere real. A link you put in your LinkedIn bio leads to a page that actually reflects your work, your thinking, and your positioning - not a social profile optimised for connection requests.
The URL is the asset.
Why it matters even more for analytics and AI roles
If you are an analyst, a BI engineer, or someone building AI products, your work is uniquely hard to demonstrate through credentials alone.
Anyone can put "SQL, Python, machine learning" on a resume. Almost no one can show you a live AI tool they built, a breakdown of how they approached a data modelling problem, or a clear articulation of how they think about metrics design.
A portfolio page with one real project - what the problem was, what you built, why you made the decisions you made - tells a hiring manager more in three minutes than five bullet points ever will.
This is especially true at senior levels, where the interview question is less "can you do this?" and more "would I trust you to own this?"
The meta-argument
Building this website was itself useful.
Deciding how to position myself - not just what I had done, but what I was for - forced a clarity that I did not have when my only output was a resume. Choosing what to show and what to leave out is a product decision. Writing the copy is a communication decision. Thinking about who visits and what they need from the page is, frankly, the same kind of thinking I apply to analytics product problems.
The process of building the portfolio is part of the point.
What you actually need
You do not need something elaborate. You need:
- A clean, fast page that loads in under a second
- A headline that states your positioning plainly
- Two or three real projects with actual context - problem, approach, outcome
- A way to contact you
- A place to put writing, even if it starts with one post
That is it. Everything else is polish.
The gap between having a portfolio and not having one is larger than almost any other signal you can add to your professional presence. It takes a weekend to build something credible. And it compounds from day one.
This site is built with Next.js and deployed on Vercel. The source is on GitHub.