Mastering product design interviews
Bringing your best self to product design behavioral interviews
Learn how to build rapport and communicate effectively with product, engineering and research peers
By the time you present your design portfolio, do the whiteboard exercise, and critique an app you’ll be half way done through your onsite product design interview. Next up? Behavioral interviews.
I’ll break this interview format down by function: outside of design you’ll learn how to build rapport with product management, engineering, and research. You’ll want to get people excited to work with you. I’ll also share best practices with stories of success and failures along the way.
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Behavioral interview format at a glance
The goal of behavioral interviews is to get a 360-degree view of how you approach your work and collaborate with others. Typically these will be one-on-one interviews about 30 minutes each or 1 hour pair interviews.
If you’re applying for an in-house role (either at a startup or a large company), you’ll talk with cross functional peers in product and engineering. You might also have a researcher or a data scientist sit in. For agency roles, you’ll be primarily speaking with designers.
The best way to prepare for your onsite is by actively working with your recruiter. Find out what to expect, the schedule, and the people you’ll be speaking with.
Lastly, many companies are starting to do behavioral interviews over the phone or a video conference. While the format is different, many of the same principles apply here.
Design interviews
Usually right after your portfolio presentation you’ll be slated in for a peer design interview. If that’s the case, expect some detailed follow-up questions on your work. They’ll also dig into:
- Your past experience — anything that was mentioned in your portfolio, resume, LinkedIn, etc.
- Design collaboration — how you work with other designers
- Your working style — preferences in process and your approach to work
- Design focus — areas of design that you find interesting
Sample questions:
- How do you keep up to date on the latest trends in design?
- Why are you interested working here?
- The PM wanted the design to go a certain way that you thought wasn’t right. How did you defend your rationale?
- Tell me about a conflict you had with another designer, how did you handle it?
For a more comprehensive list check out BuzzFeed’s design interview questions.
From interviewing candidates, some folks fail to provide an adequate answer to why they’re interested in the position in the first place. It doesn’t have to be anything crazy. Talking about the team, the role or specific aspects that you’re hoping to develop are all good starters.
Interviewing with a peer designer also gives you a glimpse of what the design is process is really like. See how they approach their work. What barriers do they encounter? What’s an exciting project they’ve recently worked on? What are they looking to learn next? Get them to open up to learn more about the culture and process.
Hiring manager
Most of the time the hiring manager for a design role will come from a design background however in smaller startups they might be an engineer or a PM looking to establish a design team. Depending on who you’ll get, the questions will vary slightly but the objectives are similar.
Usually you’ll talk to them at the end—by this time the other interviewers have submitted feedback or flagged additional things to probe on. In addition to these the hiring manager will try to assess your:
- Professionalism — how you carry yourself and how you come across
- Career aspirations — where do you expect to be in the next few years
- Team fit—what team would serve you and the company best
If this is a seasoned manager they will also get straight to the point and will ask you the hard questions. Since the final decision rests on them and the consequences of a bad hire are high, they’ll want to make sure there are no remaining red flags. But it’s not all bad cop—they’ll also sell you on the role and the team.
Sample questions:
- What aspect of design is exciting to you? Why?
- What’s your area of strength?
- What’s your area of growth?
- Where do you see yourself in the next few years?
Use this time to learn about your manage as well. Are they growth oriented? Do you feel like you can get along with them? How have they supported designers previously?
Cross functional interviews
After interviewing with the designers you’ll talk with your cross functional peers: product managers, engineers, and researchers. The primary goal of these interviews is to understand how well you work with others and measure your level of empathy and consideration of others.
Product manager
In many cross functional teams you’ll work with the PM closely on a daily basis. They’ll want to know about:
- How you’ve worked with PMs and any conflicts you’ve encountered
- Your ability to work on multiple projects with different timelines
- How you balance different constraints in your work
Sample questions:
- You’re given a project that you need to execute on in 1 week in order to meet a deadline, how will you approach it?
- What types of conflicts have you encountered with product managers?
- How will you let me know if you’re going to miss a deadline?
Take the time in this interview to understand what kind of PM they are. Just like product design, product management has many aspects to it. What gets the PM excited to go to work every morning? What part of the process do they enjoy the most? How do they see design contributing to the product development process? Have they done design before? These are all good questions to keep in your back pocket.
Engineering
Engineers have the final say on what gets built as they’re the last person to touch the artifact. Similar to a PM they’ll be interested in how you partner with their kind:
- Collaboration with engineering and empathy for constraints
- Handling conflict in design and engineering situations
Sample questions:
- How do you prefer to work with engineering?
- …
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Land Your Dream Design Job is a comprehensive book about landing a product design role in a startup, agency, or tech company. It covers the entire design interview process from beginning to end, and will arm you with techniques and strategies to navigate the (at times) turbulent waters of job searching with confidence. This book will help guide you to a role that plays to your strengths while providing enough support for professional growth.
You’ll learn:
- What skills are expected of designers
- How to demonstrate those skills throughout the job search process
- How to identify your next opportunity
- How to target your job search process to stand out
- How to build a stand-out portfolio and tailor it to your dream opportunity
- The ins and outs out of various design interview types from portfolio presentations, whiteboard challenges, app critiques, to take home design exercises and many others.
You’ll also find in-depth advice on how to apply beyond the job boards, and how to conduct due diligence, negotiate compensation, and accelerate onboarding to your new role.