Navigating the Hiring Manager Interview
How to get the most out of the second step in the product design interview process — the hiring manager interview.
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.
At this point in the interview process, you’ve probably talked to the design recruiter — and they’re excited to move forward with you! With that, you’re officially on the second step of the product design interview process, so congratulations! 🎉 You’ll now be speaking with the most integral person in the interview process: the hiring manager.
Behind the scenes, the hiring manager facilitates the full hiring process, from initial outreach to final offer. They’re usually the person who creates the job description, reviews applicants, and conducts interviews. Most importantly, they make the final call about which candidate receives the offer. And once that offer is accepted, they’ll be this person’s manager — so they’re an important figure to impress!
To help you put your best foot forward, I’ll describe a preparation strategy that focuses on a few fundamental aspects of the hiring manager interview. 👇
Purpose of the hiring manager interview
When you’re scheduled to speak with the hiring manager, you can probably assume a few things:
The hiring manager has seen your portfolio/work samples already
The hiring manager has been briefed by the design recruiter after the screening call
Therefore, the hiring manager will be going into the interview with an overview of your background. They’ll use that to get one level deeper: discussing tactical and domain-specific subjects. In particular, they’ll want to know:
How you think and work. If we fast forward to you being in the role, this person will be your manager. They’ll be partnering with you closely: delegating projects to you, troubleshooting challenges with you, advocating for your career growth, providing feedback, and many other workplace interactions. They’ll want to use this interview to envision what that dynamic would look like.
Your current role and relevant experience. Product design roles look different depending on the team and company, so the hiring manager will want to understand what your experience looks like and how that aligns (or differs) from the role you’re interviewing for. They might also be curious about any unique skills or aspects of your background that you might bring to the team, so the interview is an opportunity to dig into that as well.
Your approach to collaboration, communication, and more. We’ll cover this in detail in the later section “Prepare for common topics,” but this ties into the first two points mentioned above. The hiring manager will want to see your approach to your work: how you think and what processes you have in order to be successful.
Let’s take a look at the different ways you can prepare to address each of these points through the lens of what’s important to the hiring manager.
Preparing for the interview
Start with your current understanding 🖼
Similar to how you might have prepared for the recruiter screening call by using any information available — such as reading through the job description and researching the company — you’ll follow a similar approach by building upon your previous context for each subsequent step in the interview process.
For this second step specifically, you should review what context you’ve had up to this point:
The job description, which acts as a guide about the role, team, and responsibilities
Details from your call with the design recruiter, like what the role will be working on and what the hiring manager is looking for
Any research you’ve done to understand the role, team, and company (for specifics about what research you should do, check out my other post)
These points should inform your preparation strategy. By understanding the role and the role’s context, you can anticipate what topics might come up in the interview or what questions the hiring manager might have. This proactive approach is especially helpful in situations where the recruiter might be vague about what you should expect for the hiring manager interview. Before we dive into the topics, though, we need to first figure out who the hiring manager is.
Research your interviewer 🕵️♀️
The hiring manager could work as a product design lead, design manager, principal designer, or in some other role. They could be directly involved with this role’s specific domain, adjacent to it, or outside of it entirely. Maybe they’ve had years of management experience — or maybe it’s their first time hiring!
Do some research to figure out who you’ll be speaking with. Look into their role and background: where have they worked before, how long have they been at the company, and has their role changed over time? Look them up on Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter. If you’re lucky, there might be a lot for you to work off of here — podcast interviews, publications, and a public presence where you can learn about their personality and interests. If not, you can at least take note of their career trajectory from LinkedIn.
By doing this, you can start to piece together a picture of who your hiring manager is. This will help you feel less nervous at the thought of meeting and talking to them for 30-60 minutes, and it’ll help you better understand how to frame your own experiences, projects, and skills in a way that’s important to them. You might even be able to find shared interests — which can be used to establish an immediate, and more personal, connection.
Prepare for common topics 📝
This section reviews subjects that I’ve seen most frequently covered in the hiring manager interview — both as a candidate myself and as an advisor in other candidates’ processes.
Collaboration. How do you collaborate with other roles like product managers, engineers, and other designers? How do you work with your manager? What’s your approach to collaboration, what does collaboration mean to you, and how do you collaborate effectively?
Process. What does the product design development process look like in your current role and company? How do you leverage research and data in your design process? Process depends on a myriad of different factors, and sometimes can be outside of your control. However, the hiring manager will want to understand how you approach processes — what you see as ideal versus what you’d like to change, for example.
Communication. How do you communicate effectively with other roles like product managers and engineers? How do you communicate with stakeholders? How do you share designs with these audiences? How do you capture feedback?
Your design skills. What aspects of design do you enjoy the most? What do you find as your strengths versus weaknesses? What design skills are you interested in improving?
Challenges. What projects, initiatives, or efforts haven’t gone well? What challenges have you faced in your current role? How have you overcome those challenges? How have you resolved miscommunications?
To prepare, map out each of these points with your answers; then, take it one step further and attach specific examples from your own experience to each of your answers. It will always be more compelling and persuasive to tell a story about a time when you had to improve communication processes, rather than stating that communication is important to you. And it’ll be much easier for you to share these stories, anecdotes, and lessons learned when you’ve identified them as part of your interview preparation, instead of coming up with them on the spot.
I designed a template to help with this exercise: duplicate it below!
Get comfortable talking through your portfolio 💻
One time, I was invited into an interview process where the first step was speaking with the hiring manager. After the recruiter scheduled my interview, I asked her what to expect and how I could best prepare. Her response? I should be prepared to talk about the projects in my portfolio; I might be asked to dig into them, but it would mostly be an overview.
With that advice, I still wasn’t sure what to expect. Was it a presentation or was it conversational? Was I “digging into” my projects or was I giving an overview? But my interview was soon, and I didn’t want to bother the recruiter again, so I figured it couldn’t be too different from how my other interviews were. I tried not to worry about it and hoped for the best.
When my interview arrived, I (virtually) walked in and was joined by the hiring manager. We had some small talk, and it was going well — and then she asked me to pull up my portfolio and walk her through each project in full. It took me a moment to realize that this was how we’d be spending the rest of the interview.
So I scrambled through my tabs, pulled up my website, and shared my screen. I still wasn’t sure if I was supposed to dig into my projects or give an overview, so I just started talking through a project that seemed particularly relevant to the role. I tried my best to highlight aspects about the project that were similar to bullets I remembered from the job description. And I tried to mention points that I thought the hiring manager would be interested in, based on the research I had done.
The situation was far from ideal. My portfolio pages weren’t “presentation-ready,” and I had to jump around a lot or fill in additional details to frame the projects as linear narratives more suitable for a presentation format. Except for a few questions from the hiring manager, the conversational onus was mostly defaulted to me, the candidate, to steer and fill the time, which I wasn’t expecting. Because of this dynamic, I also wasn’t sure how closely they had reviewed my portfolio prior to the interview, or if they had certain areas they wanted me to talk about. By the end of it, I wasn’t super happy about being put on the spot to present my full body of work, for 45 minutes, as a first interview — especially when it wasn’t made clear earlier in the process.
Even though I was grumbling to myself about it afterwards, it was a hard lesson learned: any project and detail on your portfolio is fair game to be discussed and asked about in an interview. Had I approached interviewing with that mindset, I might have been more prepared — rather than waiting until the interview to realize that some of my projects had confusing narratives, weren’t laid out logically, or were missing helpful visuals.
You never know what kind of interview situation you’ll be put in; so to prepare for any scenario, practice talking through each of your portfolio projects, focusing on points that seem especially relevant to the job description. You can even imagine yourself in a scenario similar to what I described above: you’re in an interview and you’re asked to pull up your website and talk through your projects in length. During your practice, notice any points that you might want to mention in the actual interview (you can add these to the “mapping” exercise described earlier). And if you notice any things in your portfolio that should be fixed, budget time to do that before your interview.
This exercise is helpful regardless of what interview format you end up having. Your projects and experiences will be the focal point of the hiring manager interview — so reviewing your projects in detail, as they’re presented on your website, is a good way to refresh your memory of important points (or collaborations, processes, challenges, etc.) that are helpful to weave in. And by reviewing your own portfolio, it’ll help you better understand what context the hiring manager is coming into the interview with.
Prepare your own questions 💬
Lastly, keep in mind that the hiring manager is the expert on the role you’re applying for. They’ll be working closely with this role each day, and they likely have a vision for what the role will look like and the impact it’ll have on the team. Because of that, you should take advantage of the time you have with them: ask any questions you have about the role, responsibilities, team, company, etc. Just as the full interview process is an opportunity for you to evaluate if the role is a good fit for you, the hiring manager interview is a window into what it would be like working with this person as your manager.
The hiring manager interview is more open-ended than other stages in the interview process, but these steps — refreshing your understanding of the role, researching your interviewer, preparing for common topics, and practicing talking through your projects — will help you cover your bases and have a successful, fulfilling conversation. 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).
Thank you Nicole! This is so helpful for prepping for my interview with a founder tmr! :)