How to Prepare for Your Product Design Interview Loop
Spend your time effectively by focusing on these points at each step in the interview process.
Hey there! I’m Nicole, and I’m a product designer. I write this newsletter to share my experiences and lessons learned through my work as a product designer.
Being invited to interview for a product design role is an exciting opportunity – it’s a chance for you to put your best foot forward and to evaluate if the role is a good fit for you.
When I was interviewing for different roles, I learned so much about different companies, teams, design organizations, and products. It was fascinating to be able to speak with so many people throughout the interview process and to hear what they’re passionate about.
However, interviewing can also be pretty stressful. Especially for product design roles, where wide and deep domain knowledge is required, it’s hard to figure out what you should know before going into an interview. What kind of preparation is most helpful to do, and how can you make sure you’re spending your time effectively before your interview?
In this post, I’ll be going over what kind of research and preparation worked well for me in my interview process, from unpacking the job description to deep-dives on the company and product(s). By following these points, or at least using them as a launching off point, you’ll be able to show up more prepared and confident for your interviews – and ready to ask your own interview questions!
Note: this post focuses only on the interviews involved in the process, not the portfolio presentation, which warrants its own separate post. I’ll dive into that in a later newsletter.
Before we begin: Set up your note-taking system
Before starting any interviews, you should first set up a digital space where you can take notes, organize your findings, and keep track of your research.
I wrote another post here, where you can read about my recommended best practices for this. In that post, you can also get the link to duplicate my FigJam file that I used to keep track of my own notes during this process.
How to approach your research and interview prep
Interviewing is a super time-consuming process. When you add in the fact that product design roles require many, many steps in the interview process, and that you’ll likely be interviewing with multiple companies in tandem, it can quickly become overwhelming and unmanageable. To maximize the effort you’re putting in, I recommend the following approach: as you progress in the interview process, your own research and preparation efforts should scale up accordingly.
In other words, you shouldn’t be spending tons of time upfront, such as for your phone screenings, doing all kinds of research and deep-diving into each and every company. This is for a few reasons – it might not end up working out after the phone screening, and you don’t want to have your time wasted. Or more practically, you won’t know much about what you should be looking into until you speak with the recruiter and/or hiring manager. As a candidate, it’s important to manage your own time (and energy) in this process accordingly.
With that in mind, the rest of this post will describe the research you should focus on doing at each step. Let’s get into it! 👇
For your phone screening with the design recruiter
For your first conversation with the company, you’ll usually have a 30 minute phone call with a recruiter. (For an in-depth look at what that call entails, check out my other post below on navigating the design recruiter screening call.)
Going into this call, you’ll want to have some preliminary research done:
What to expect from the call and how to make the most of it (check out my other post for this!)
What the role is and what team the role is on
The main product(s) that the role is focused on
The company’s size and overall mission
Most of these insights can be gleaned from the job description, so it’s helpful to comb through that prior to your call. Any mention of the role’s team in particular can provide you with a deeper understanding of what subsequent research you might need to do. Especially for larger companies, the rest of the interview process will be focused on details specific to the team at hand: what problems the team is seeking to solve, what users the team is designing for, etc. If it’s a smaller company, coverage of the team might not be as explicit and therefore the role might be a part of multiple various product efforts.
I also recommend getting an understanding of the larger company. The company’s size (usually found on LinkedIn) can give you an indication of how its product design work might be organized and structured. For example, a smaller company of 100-200 employees hiring for a product designer might be looking for someone with more of a generalist, multidisciplinary skill set. On the other hand, a larger company of a few hundred or thousand might have more structure and defined responsibilities for product designers and a variety of different teams, each with their own product designer.
Similarly, understanding the company’s mission can reveal what the company’s goals are and what the company finds important. Especially for smaller companies, you’ll likely be contributing to the company’s mission in more direct ways than at bigger companies, where the teams are more diversified and focused on specific aspects of the mission or product ecosystem.
During the call, your recruiter will provide more details about each of the bullets listed above. As such, your preliminary research should be focused on getting a general understanding of each of those points.
With that, you’ll be able to keep up with the recruiter’s description of the role more easily, and you can also have thoughtful questions prepared for your recruiter about the role. Being that each interview is an opportunity to assess if the role is a good fit for you, asking any questions you have based on your research is a great way to do that!
Take notes about the details your recruiter mentions during the call. You should also highlight any specific points that you feel would be helpful to do more research on. That research can be done prior to your next interview, described below.
For your interview with the hiring manager
After chatting with the recruiter, you’ll usually speak to the hiring manager next. This could be a design manager, product design lead, head of design, or another person on the team who will (usually) be managing this role.
Typically, this conversation will be more focused on your own experiences, background, and the role/team/product you’re interviewing for. As such, you might want to do more research for this step than previously done for the recruiter call. The extra research will help you show up prepared, confident, and curious to learn more about the role.
For the call with the hiring manager, you should have the points from the section above researched. In addition to those points, I also recommend looking into the following:
Any notes from your call with the recruiter that you wanted to follow up on. For example, if the recruiter mentioned specifics about the role’s team and product focus, you can dig into that further prior to your call with the hiring manager.
Your interviewer’s background and experience
The users that this role is focused on
The composition of the role’s team, such as how many other designers are on the team (if applicable), their backgrounds, etc.
For this research, you’ll have to dig deeper than the job description. To find this information, I recommend checking out the following sources:
The company’s website, and specifically any product pages on the website. For example, look for website pages that describe the company’s products or services, especially those that are specific to the role you’re interviewing for.
The company’s blog, and specifically if they have a product- or design-related blog. Smaller companies might not have a product blog or design blog, so looking at the general blog can give you insight on recent news and announcements from the company – some of which might be product-specific!
The company’s LinkedIn. From there, you can look at the “People” section to find who works there, and search by keywords “design” or “product” to get an understanding of the product/design team’s composition. Taking a look at team members’ profiles and experiences can give you an idea of where the team currently stands and what the hiring manager might be looking for.
(Optional) The company’s YouTube channel (if applicable). Taking a look at any videos that are created and uploaded by the company can provide deeper insight into their products, marketing, and larger strategy. Especially for B2B products, where it might be hard to find examples of what the product experience looks and feels like, you can sometimes find walkthroughs or demos on YouTube. When I was interviewing for especially niche roles, this approach ended up being massively helpful!
If you still have time after covering those points and you’d like to be extra prepared, I also recommend thinking through the broader market for the company and/or the team you’ll be on. For example, if you’re interviewing for a role focused on marketplaces, getting an understanding of competitors, similar products, and the market opportunity will be helpful when speaking to the hiring manager and all others involved in the interview process. This doesn’t have to be extensive research, and you won’t be faulted for not being an expert. However, it can definitely get you bonus points if the conversation with the hiring manager or other team members turns toward that (and it often will, for more mid-level and above product design roles).
During your interview with the hiring manager, you can take note of how they describe the team, product, and company. Highlighting anything that stood out to you or that you need to do follow-up research on will help you with subsequent interviews.
It’s also a good opportunity to ask specific questions based on your research about those topics and more. The hiring manager will usually be the expert on the role, so have your questions prepared and take advantage of that opportunity!
For your interviews with other team members
After speaking with the hiring manager, you might have a series of other steps in the interview process, ranging from a portfolio presentation to a whiteboarding exercise or a take-home assignment. Afterwards, as the interview process is drawing to a close, you’ll usually have a series of 1-1 interviews with other team members.
These interviews are usually with folks whom you’ll be working closely with in the actual role. That could include other designers or cross-functional peers like product managers, engineering leads, or others. These interviews will typically also be more conversational, with time for questions from both sides.
As such, you’ll want to ramp up your research for this stage in particular. Especially if you’re chatting with cross-functional peers, they’ll be focused on aspects of your work that are more relevant to them.
To prepare for the questions they’ll have and also what questions to ask, you can research the following:
Any notes from your call with the recruiter, hiring manager, or other interviews that you wanted to follow up on
Your interviewers’ backgrounds and experiences
The team’s product focus and users; what problem(s) they’re trying to solve; the broader market and market opportunities
If you’ve researched those points earlier in the process, now’s a good time to brush up on your familiarity and dive deeper if possible.
I also found it helpful to research common best practices around collaboration with the different roles I was interviewing with. Especially if you’re coming from a smaller company, where the processes aren’t as established or you might not have had the opportunity to work with a specific role (e.g. the one that you’re now interviewing with), this research can help fill in any gaps in your experience. Your interviewers in these conversations will usually be interested to know how you would collaborate with them, so it’s a good idea to understand how to approach and describe various scenarios.
As an exercise to help you conduct research at this stage in the interview process, evaluate each term from the list below and assess how it relates to the product that the role is focused on. From my experience, any of these terms, generally or specific to the company, could come up during the interview. So, if any of them do, you’ll already have an idea of how they apply; and if not, you can ask specific questions for any terms/topics that you’d like to understand more about how they relate to the product(s). (If you’re interviewing with one or several people who work within these teams, feel free to direct questions toward their respective “expert.”)
Product management: product maturity, product-market fit, working with stakeholders, go-to-market strategy, prioritization processes, the company’s larger ecosystem of products (if applicable)
Design: the company’s design process, how designers collaborate with product managers, how designers collaborate with engineers, research processes
Engineering: any technologies used by the team/company, design and developer handoff process and collaboration
Interviewing is a challenging process to navigate, but hopefully these pointers can provide you with a clear direction of how to spend your time and energy effectively. Researching the right things will also help you better ascertain whether a role is right for you. And ultimately, the right research will bolster your confidence when going into your interviews – making them more successful all around. Good luck! 🙏
I hope you found this newsletter helpful! If you’re interested in reading more, subscribe here for free and share it with a friend. You can also find me on Twitter (@wontonface).