It seems to me that there’s been an increased interest in product design as a viable career in the wider culture — that’s really cool! That said, I haven’t personally seen too much information about what it’s like to interview as a product designer, which is understandable (no one likes doing interviews, so why would someone write about them? No idea). With this in mind, in this article, I’d like to shed some light on some common hiring pipeline patterns for product designers.
(I will not be detailing exactly how to rock each step of the process, but I’ll probably be writing articles in the future that will, so feel free to watch out for that.)
Getting leads
I’ve talked about this at length in previous articles but, to make some long articles short, you need the following things to get into hiring pipelines (and, later, hired):
- Good visual design,
- Plausible case studies (no less than two, no more than three; both in a website form to send to recruiters, and in a slide deck when you’re actually in the hiring pipeline).
If you don’t have these two things (good visual design and some case studies in an online portfolio), you’re going to have a harder time getting leads, so you’ll not be getting into hiring pipelines consistently. Because your chances are lower, your time to entry into the field is likely going to be much longer than it could be otherwise.
If you want more information about how to get these two things, those two articles linked above (here and here, for your convenience) could be good starting points (e.g., elaboration on what “plausible” case studies are, some prompts to help you get started on those, more detail on how to acquire good visual design, etc.). But, for the sake of this opinion piece, I’m going to assume you’ve already got these.
In the loop
Now that you have the basics needed to attract customers, you can start getting into hiring pipelines (or “loops”) more consistently. So let’s talk about what it’s like to do a full interview loop. Every company’s different, so they won’t all look like this, but here’s the general shape:
First bite
At this stage, you’ve either cold applied to a role (always go on the company’s site and apply directly) and got a response, or a recruiter’s reached out to you. Alternatively, you might be contacted by a design manager who’s hiring on to his/her design team. More rarely, you might be chatting with the CEO him/herself, as there can be tiny startups that don’t currently have recruiters on staff (and who might want to manage hiring on their own).
Regardless, at this point, you have a lead, and you’ll be scheduling time together to discuss the nature of it.
Phone screen
This is usually just a thirty minute phone call but, rarely, it can be a video chat. It’s often purely informational. You two will exchange short introductions (you can talk about where you currently work and/or study, or that you’re a recent grad, or that you’re a career transitioner, or whatever you’re currently up to lately!), and then the recruiter will talk a bit about the company, and which teams they support at their company (if it’s a larger company, they might be hiring on to multiple teams; if it’s a very large company, the recruiter has a few teams they explicitly support).
You can ask for information about the team(s) they’re hiring on — whatever might occur to you. I like to know the size of the team(s) they’re supporting, how many designers are on them, and how many designers there might be at the company (in total). It can be good to know if you’re one of few, or one of many! Or if the team you’re being hired on is brand new (the company may have changed its focus in some way, and this could have resulted in some new teams being formed). All good context to have.
By the end of the call, if you’re both still interested, the recruiter will pass your portfolio over to the hiring manager(s), who will make the decision to move forward with you (or not). At a very large company, the recruiter will start scheduling a portfolio review with an available designer at the company.
Portfolio presentation
If you get to this stage, your portfolio site worked, and now the focus is going to be almost entirely on your portfolio presentation. This will take the form of a presentation deck, so make sure to have this prepared. This is often done with a hiring manager (usually a design manager on a team you might be placed on), or any designer with open availability at a company (if the company is particularly large, for example).
These calls can be anywhere from thirty (e.g., Meta) to fifty-five (e.g., Apple) minutes long. I’ve never seen anything longer or shorter than this range. A couple things to do here:
- Clarify how much total talking time you get (the call might be scheduled for fifty-five minutes, but the team might request you leave ten minutes for questions). And make sure your presentation fits the talking time, not the total call duration, as these may (or may not) be the same,
- Clarify how you would prefer to receive questions (at the end of the entire presentation, at the end of each case study, or any time throughout — it’s usually your preference, but sometimes the team has one, so just ask),
- Clarify how many case studies the team would like to see. Generally, you should have about two case studies ready to share, and no less. If there’s lots of time, you could potentially fit a third, or just go even deeper on the two. You can discuss this with the recruiter.
Virtual onsite
Most people are doing remote hiring these days, but this could also be in person (I haven’t experienced this in many years, personally). Regardless, this can occur over a full day, just a few hours, or even broken up across multiple days. The recruiter will let you know, but you might also have an option (you can tell the recruiter if you’d prefer to break it up across days or not, and they can try to accommodate that).
The structure of this can vary, but it often involves:
- Giving your presentation again, this time to a larger panel of people. You should clarify if the parameters of this will change compared against your last presentation (it might be longer, or it might be the same — just make sure),
- A whiteboarding challenge. These are often thirty to forty-five minutes, and you usually get the prompt in that very moment. As with the presentation, clarify if you have the full time allotted to work, or if you need to also make time for questions. Also, you can often make specific requests for the whiteboarding tool you want to use (e.g., FigJam, Miro, Invision Freehand, etc.)— your choice!
- An app critique. This involves you and your interviewer picking an app together off your phone and you leading the conversation around it. Sometimes the interviewer has a strong opinion about the app selection, or you might come in with one already selected, so just clarify this with the recruiter ahead of time. Whichever is selected, I like to quickly start off by talking about the company’s business model (how it makes most of its money) — how a company makes money can impact how the product works, and how they build (or will build) features. You want to talk about the experience, or how it works right now. You can talk about what you might change, what you agree or disagree with, and why you think something was made the way it was (essentially reverse engineering the logic behind various decisions). You can also talk about the quality of the visuals (consistent iconographic language, treatments of the type and size contrast, layout, etc.). I would recommend you share your phone screen (Android: could use something called Vysor, not free; iOS, could just use QuickTime),
- A bunch of other 1:1s, primarily behavioral in nature. You might get put on a 1:1 with different xfn partners, like PMs (these are not project managers), engineers, researchers, project managers (if any — these are fairly uncommon in tech companies), or other cross-functional roles you might be working with. They will ask you “behavioral” questions (“tell me about a time when…”), usually, or will ask specific questions about the work you presented. It depends. Oftentimes, those questions can be thematic — either based on the role you’re chatting with (“tell me about a time when you disagreed with the direction a PM set on a product/feature”), or they might be related to the company’s values (e.g., “leadership principles,” or examples where you “disagreed and committed,” and so on and so forth). You can ask the recruiter what the nature of these 1:1s might be like.
Regardless of what happens here, the final step is hearing back from the recruiter.
A decision is made
Following your full interview loop, it’s standard practice for companies to get back to you in a week or less (usually less), but a company might have a good reason to need more time, so you can just ask the recruiter.
Depending on the size and approach of the company, the information collected about you up until this point might be organized in something called a “hiring packet,” and then evaluated by another set of people who were not present for your original hiring panel. Some big companies do this, some don’t — most small companies don’t have enough people to do something like this, so they might just debrief about your candidacy after all the feedback’s been submitted by your panelists.
Regardless of the decision that’s made, you can certainly ask for feedback (unless the recruiter’s already specified ahead of time that they cannot provide that, which happens). It’s their choice whether to share that or not, though. I ask for feedback whether or not I get the offer — I do feel comfortable asking for details, too, for example, “would it have helped if I had explained {thing the team didn’t like} in another way, instead?”
If they want to bring you aboard, they’ll also tell you about your level, at this point (unless they were hiring for a specific level upfront, which the recruiter should tell you; that said, they might adjust your level, even in these cases, depending on the discussion that happens following the full interview loop). Most companies, even small ones, have some notion of levels — at smaller companies, the IC (“individual contributor,” so anyone who isn’t a manager) track might look like interns, juniors, seniors, and, sometimes, staff. At larger companies, there are a series of numbers that can broadly correspond to titles. For example, at Twitter, an L6 (“L” here probably means “level”) designer is a senior designer while, at Meta, an IC5 designer is a senior designer. Companies create levels for numerous reasons, but it’s primarily to control costs by assigning compensation to specific levels. At big tech companies, your level also determines the positions that will be open to you (for instance, Instagram might only be hiring IC6, or staff level, designers right now).
Depending on all parties’ availability, this can take just a few weeks (maybe three). It often takes a month and some change, though. I have personally experienced a four month long loop with a big tech company (from the first moment the recruiter reached out to a verbal offer).
Team matching
If you’re working with a small company, you’ll probably already know which product team (there might not be more than one, anyway!) you’ll be on. At larger companies, there might be multiple teams, and the hiring managers might decide for you what teams they want you on, and it all happens behind the scenes. Or maybe two hiring managers are split on who gets you, and then they have to pitch you. It depends!
But, generally speaking, at very big tech companies, you have to pass the “general” interviews, — likely with people you’ll be statistically unlikely to work with, considering how many employees there are! — to initiate something called “team matching” (it could happen sooner, like after the portfolio review — it really just depends on the company!). Team matching is how the company determines what product and team you’ll be on. Once your hiring packet and leveling is approved, it goes out to hiring managers, who can indicate interest in your packet. If this happens, your recruiter will ping you and set up a call. From there, you talk to the interested hiring manager, learn about their problem area and product (e.g., a moderation team on Instagram). You can ask your recruiter to set up additional calls, if you like, to meet others on the team, etc. Otherwise, if you both feel good about the opportunity, you tell the recruiter how you feel, and they give you an official offer in hand, with your compensation, level, and team.
If you’re team matching at a big tech company, this can take months. It’s impossible to know. In most cases, it probably takes a month, but you might have very specific criteria, or a very specific level that most teams aren’t looking for, etc. Regardless, if you pass the interviews, your packet is good for a year before you would have to do a full loop again.
Final thoughts
Most companies, big or small, tend to follow this pattern, but not all. Big tech companies tend to establish the broad patterns of pipelines, and then smaller tech companies tend to follow, sometimes putting their own spin on it (they might have an app critique, they might not; they might do lots of anonymization in your hiring packet, they might not; they might allow original panelists to debrief, they might not; they might do whiteboarding, they might not; etc).
The way these pipelines are set up changes every year, and big tech companies tend to set the tone. Something that seems to be sharply falling out of fashion (I haven’t done these in many years, for example) is the “design challenge,” or a “take-home challenge,” which is why I didn’t mention it. You can think of this like a whiteboarding session — one that’s longer (usually a week turnaround) than the usual thirty minutes, and one you take home — that results in a case study, so you probably want to make a presentation out of the work you did by the end of it. The recruiter should give you all the information you need (e.g., prompt, specific requirements around outcome, the allotted timeline, etc.) but, if there’s something you don’t understand, make sure to ask.
If you have any questions, concerns, or wanted to include anything I might have forgotten, please let me know! Otherwise, feel free to look out for a guide I’ll write in some future, where I talk about how to build a case study, and also how to whiteboard, in detail.
