Why I don’t use portfolio anymore to screen product designers

It’s very common that a “portfolio” is required to be considered for a product designer position. But hey, let’s reconsider it. Why is it relevant? What does a portfolio tell us? Well, as I’ve reviewed lots of portfolios, I’d say, not much…

The purpose of product design is to solve the customer’s problems. The result of product design is a product that delivers value to the intended customers. The process of product design is thinking, researching, tinkering, building, testing, measuring, iterating, and shipping. The bar for product designer is ever high, moving toward “fullstack” just as software engineers. This requires us to rethink the product designer hiring process.

In almost all the portfolios I’ve seen, I saw the end user interfaces. But in fact, here are the questions I’d like to get answered by a product designer candidate.

• What problem(s) were you trying to solve with this product?
• How did you know it is a problem that needs to be solved? Who did you talk to? How did you validate the customer’s need? What questions did you ask the customers? What did you learn from talking to the customers?
• What options did you consider for solving this problem?
• Why did you choose this option in your final product vs. others?
• How did you create this design? What’s the process? What software did you use? How long did it take?
• How did you build the product (or prototype)? Did you write HTML, CSS and JavaScript? What frontend framework did you use?
• How many iterations did you do on this design? Why did you eventually choose this layout?
• Why did you keep these information on the screen? What information did you remove from the design?
• Did you write the copy?
• Did you show the final product to the customers? What did they say? What did you learn from them? What’s working and what’s not?
• Did you ship the final product? How did you integrate the design with the engineers?
• How did you market the product? How did you invite customers to use the product?
• How many revenues did the product generate for the business? How many new customers did the product contribute to the business?

And if it’s not a solo effort, I’d like to see how the candidate worked with other designers, product managers, engineers and the marketing team.

Does a portfolio tell me any of those? Unfortunately, very little.

Not surprisingly, it is next to impossible to answer these questions in a portfolio, and we need to fill the gap. One way I tried — which has been working extremely well — is to integrate the right candidate in an end-to-end product design. Just like some startups are pioneering the hiring process for software engineers, where they integrate the right candidate in a full-scope coding project. The idea is simple — to see whether (s)he can take an idea from conception all the way to shipping the product and bringing customers along. I believe the best way to test this out is to work together with the candidate on a real design project for an extended period of time. You’ll probably find answers to all the questions above — and even more — after the seemingly grueling process.

Yes, it may sound intimidating. But hey, if someone cannot pass this hurdle, or worse, doesn’t even bother standing up to the challenge, you may not want him or her on your A team anyways!

Additional notes: What I argued above may not apply to other type of design positions like visual designers or copywriters.