What differentiates a project case study/portfolio walkthrough for a senior designer?
When I was a young, naive designer just starting I had no problem presenting a powerpoint where the UX process was nice and straightforward because I thought that's how it worked. When you're a junior with little responsibility you actually kind of have the flexibility to shape projects to fit this format.
The more experienced I get, the more I question what the hell I'm doing or have done. Like to the point I'm questioning if my portfolio has even improved since 6 years ago when I started. I've worked on some big trendy things (cloud infrastructure, generative AI) for huge companies, and have had high praise from every manager I've had, but honestly I struggle to find a single project that I think is really impressive or fits a case study well.
Most of my work is like, we added this super dense table with a bunch of data and search and filter capabilities or we added this form to an existing workflow so users can do this thing they've been asking about. Things that make millions of dollars for companies but are not visually impressive to look at.
They say they want to hear about process, but I think every single company I've heard from has all described more or less the same exact process (collab between product, dev, and UX teams; iterate; data-based decisions, etc).
I feel like I might spend too much time setting up the problem and explaining the technical stuff that the interviewers check out. But that's where the hard part of my work is. I can't take up an hour long session talking about how the alert banner we had to customize for this edge case error "delights" our users.
What do they want to see when you get to these more senior interviews? It feels disingenuous to try and cover a project that took 6 months to a year in 30-60 min with as much detail as they ask for.
Should I focus on a design system re-design rather than these feature/service specific projects?