Product Designer - Portfolio review

This is the gating interview (the way the coding exercise is for engineers) before scheduling a complete set of interviews with the candidate.

The goals of this interview are to:

  • Understand the candidate’s approach and philosophy to design.
  • Validate the candidate’s design competency.
  • How the candidate communicates and presents their ideas.
  • The candidate’s ability to influence and persuade others.

Invite prompt

The candidate will be sent the following to allow them to prepare for the interview:

In this interview, we will be looking for you to give some real insight into a problem you were solving as part of a project you’ve worked on. We would like you to lead us through this problem or case study in detail. We’ll look to understand the size and structure of the team you were a part of, the goals of the project, your low-fidelity design work, your high-fidelity design skills, how you approached research, how you synthesized research data to inform design decisions, what design standards and guidelines you worked within, and how you collaborated with a wider team. We are particularly interested in your process for the project, the outcomes, the challenges you encountered, and tradeoffs you made.

Script

Lead us through a case study from your portfolio (or equivalent).

Ask follow up questions:

  • Who was involved in this decision?
  • Why did you choose to use this process?
  • What conclusions did you make?
  • What would you change about this project if you could go back and do things again?
  • What was the biggest challenge of this project?

Other useful follow up questions:

  • How did you educate the developers and others about good design process?
  • How did you facilitate the remote design collaboration meetings?

Evaluation

A successful candidate should be able to organize their time, manage the room, and effectively communicate their process for a case study. They should have a clear understanding of process, and why a process worked in a particular situation. It is excellent if their case study is directly comparable to the kind of work they will be doing for Sourcegraph.