The Portfolio Is the Portfolio

The contours of limitation.

Sep 05, 2024

Aligning the work to be done with the skills and ambitions of the team is critical to good management and team leadership. It’s also…hard.

On any given creative team, the portfolio is the portfolio.

Hey, Boyd, that’s real profound: “the portfolio is the portfolio.” Good one.

Yeah, I know. But here’s what I mean: in an agency, say, you’ve got the book of work that you’ve got. Sure, you’re probably doing some “business development” to try and expand it, but it is what it is.

In an internal team, your organization is working on the projects it's working on. Your specific team might have a bit of leverage to influence that (probably not), but at any given moment, it is what it is.

Look, if you’re a Design Manager working at a company that primarily makes promotional materials for industrial conferences, then you’re probably assigning a lot of brochure and coffee mug designs to your team. It’s what your company does!

Anyway, as a manager and a leader you can look at the portfolio and see: here are the products/projects/campaigns/initiatives/what-have-yous that need my team’s input. And you can look at the team and see: here are the skills and ambitions I have available to deploy against this work.

Do they align? Let’s hope so!

NOTE! An important warning before I get going here: this essay is not going to get into “layoffs” (or “redundancies” for those in the EU/UK) as a “solution” for the misalignment of portfolio and team. Layoffs suck and are the last refuge of scoundrels and CFOs. They do happen, of course, and at some point I may very well write some thoughts about layoffs. But this essay is much more concerned with what you, dear reader, middle-manager that you probably are, might be in control of. It assumes that you’ve hired an awesome team and want — and are able — to keep them around.

There are countless ways the team and portfolio might be out of alignment, but I think of them in three buckets: the work might have evolved, the people might have evolved, or management might have screwed it up in the first place.

It was a massive, disruptive change in the industry.

I worked in the game industry during the shift from 2D art to 3D art. Some artists made this transition seamlessly — they learned new tools and pipelines, developed new aesthetic approaches, and found a way to leverage their existing skills in this new medium.

Some actually loved this transition, while others did it successfully but grudgingly (a job is a job, and loving work is for suckers, after all).

But there were many who simply would not or could not make the leap. Some found the new aesthetics disappointing, even off-putting. Other’s found the tools (ultra-technical, unintuitive, and unreliable as they were) too burdensome. Still others just never got the opportunity even to make the decision for themselves. It was a massive, disruptive change in the industry.

Nonetheless, the change was not total and complete — that is, there was still 2D art to be made. It wasn’t necessarily less important, but it was definitely less plentiful.

Or similarly, think about the relationship between photography and illustration in print ads. For a very long time there were no photos in ads — first because, well, photography didn’t exist, and then because there was still, for a long time, a strong preference for illustration.1

Even today, there are plenty of print (and online) ads featuring illustration even while photography is as ubiquitous as it has ever been. There’s room for both…but also a requirement for both.

If you were putting together a team from scratch in the age of 3D game art, no problem: you hire a bunch of 3D artists and a smaller number of 2D specialists. Want to put together a photography studio? You hire photographers.

But if you were in medias res, as it were, running a full-service production team, you didn’t need photographers or 3D artists, and then…you did. And you needed a lot of illustrators and 2D artists until…you needed fewer. The portfolio and the team had become misaligned.2

A high-performance team is filled with people who have great skills that still nonetheless might become the wrong skills.

This situation is often quite stark. The composition of the work has changed, but the composition of the team hasn’t. There’s not infinite money or time to throw at solving the problem, and it’s not just the work-product at stake: people’s careers are in play.

A high-performance team is filled with people who have great skills that still nonetheless might become the wrong skills. It can be heart-wrenching as a manager to have to give critical feedback to someone who just isn’t capable of doing the work they’ve been assigned.

But the portfolio, after all, is the portfolio. And the team is the team.

At least until it isn’t.

Here’s a twist: often unhappy people — usually the top performers, naturally — will just leave if the portfolio is not aligned with their desires (let alone their skills). Eventually, they’re going to want to work on something else. I’ve managed this person. I’ve been this person.

Of course, that can be okay! The right amount of turnover is healthy. The wrong amount of turnover, though (whether too little or too much, honestly), can be tough. Losing top performers because they’ve run out of runway to grow is a tough pill to swallow, but sometimes, swallow it we must.

Still, whether it’s the work that has become misaligned with the people, or the people who have grown out of the work, the situation has become perilous. Or…of course, there’s that third bucket: maybe management has just screwed it up. Maybe it hasn’t become perilous, maybe it was built that way.

Some of the onus here must be on the management and hiring process. Actually assembling a team with the right expertise, at the right level, with healthy levels of initiative to address the known portfolio of work is hard. Factor in the unknown future, and it’s basically five dimensional chess.

No matter how many “gurus” mention it, no one can “see around corners.”3 But surely it is incumbent upon good leadership to at least have a sense where things are going and build to that. We won’t always get it right, but hopefully we can at least start from a strong position.

And don’t resist that healthy team turnover! Take advantage of it to set up for the future.

Don’t pretend it isn’t happening.

None of this is meant to be defeatist, though. It is meant to be realistic. This is a hard situation! At least there are two obvious things not to do.

Don’t pretend it isn’t happening. Whether the portfolio has evolved into something different than the team was built for, or whether the team is just getting restless working on the current stuff, there’s no point in pretending the situation is otherwise.

Thinking the creative professionals on the team are infinitely flexible and amenable to — or even capable of — any arbitrary work is unstable at best, kind of cruel and unfair at worst.

If you want a team of people who are unhappy and struggling but who stick around because they are out of options in their careers, this is the way to get it. Not exactly a recipe for A+ work.

Being forthright and transparent about any situation is pretty much always the way to go, and that’s especially true here. Ignoring complaints, gaslighting the team, angrily insisting all these delicate snowflakes should just be happy to have a job at all — these are great ways to drop this particular ball. Believe me.

Sure, we may string the team along for a little while with the promise of better-aligned work to come. (Lying to do this is 100% bad, but no one can tell me they haven’t indulged in a little wishful thinking.) Or we may roll the dice that the new “fad” is just that: a fad. Fingers crossed!

The flip side of being dishonest with the team is being dishonest with the realities of the business environment.

As I quipped in All Endeavor Creates Process: “The dirty little not-so-secret of professional creative work is that it’s…professional. There’s business involved!” That is true here, too. The flip side of being dishonest with the team is being dishonest with the realities of the business environment.4

Hanging on to work streams that no longer provide value is not sustainable. Trying to coerce the portfolio into a shape that does not make business sense is its own kind of peril.

Imagine that game development studio going through the Great 3D Revolution™: they could have decided to appease their art team by doubling down on 2D games…only then to learn there simply wasn’t a big enough market to remain viable anyway. Adapt or die!5

All decision is compromise; someone will be unhappy.

Okay, okay. Let’s not misunderstand my role here. I’m not the answer guy. I’m the guy sitting in the back tossing out evocative but inscrutable koans: “the portfolio is the portfolio,” “the checklist is not a checklist,” “you can’t have done it until you do it.”

I obviously don’t have some end-all-be-all answer to this. In another essay, I’ll throw out some potential solutions that I’ve seen work. This is a rich vein and I intend to mine it!

But ultimately, the reality is that there may not be a “right” answer anyway. All decision is compromise; someone will be unhappy.

Those times are rare indeed when the universe just conspires to keep the team and portfolio exactly aligned — with high-performing team members happily feeding their ambition, healthy turnover, and interesting new challenges emerging at just the right cadence.

I know I sound like a real broken record6 on this, but the best approach — whatever else it turns out to be — seems likely to be intentional, transparent, inclusive, and accountable. If it’s not at least all four of those things, woe be to the manager. (Probably you).

The portfolio is the portfolio. And thus shall it be.7

We’ve all definitely experienced poor adaptation to a changing book of work, but have you seen anything that worked well? I’ve got a few ideas coming up, but would love to hear some contributions. Leave a comment!

Ars Pandemonium

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