5 Steps to Get Hired as a Product Designer
By Catherine Aurelio
Startups are recognizing more and more what great value designers bring to product teams. As a result, it’s becoming a more competitive job market for product designers looking for roles that will allow them use the skills they have and build the skills they need to succeed long term in the industry.
Siong Chan, Shu Lai and Catherine Aurelio lead the product design organization at Coursera. Hiring is a very large component of our roles and responsibilities. We do enough interviewing that it has become very clear to all three of us when an interview is on point. It stands out and we all know it and feel it when it happens. It’s also crystal clear when it’s off point.
In order to help product designers land more meaningful roles that advance their careers we want to share some insights we’ve gathered about the qualities that signal success, or in some cases failure, to us during the interview process.
It’s also important to note that these qualities don’t just end during the interview process. They also best define designers who are able to succeed and thrive in the organizations we’ve built and led over the years.
Step 1: Know Your Audience
You’d be amazed at the number of product designers, junior and — more frighteningly — senior, who show up and know nothing about Coursera. Worse, sometimes people come with disjointed presentations that ramble through websites or Sketch files, never landing on simple “problem → solution” workflows. As a general rule of thumb here are a few ways to prepare:
- Understand the competitive landscape of the company where you are interviewing and the people who are interviewing you.
- Learn about the software that company makes and make sure to explain why you are interested in designing solutions for that company.
- If possible, try to tie some of what you have done in your career to the mission or goals of the company where you’d like to work.
These are important points because you are being hired based on your fitness to solve design problems within a company. Your personal and career goals should align with the problem space. But, it’s very important to lead with the idea that you are interested in joining the company primarily to help solve the set of needs at hand vs. solely trying to advance your career.
Make a cohesive deck that shows breadth and depth. You probably have a portfolio website. But, crack open Keynote and put together a deck that delivers clear cues about your process and learnings as you tell the story about the work you are going to present.
Step 2: Tell Good Stories
If you can’t explain the value of your work, how can we expect you to explain that value to other cross functional groups — like product management and engineering — in order to get the feature or system you designed built? Being able to explain how you tie your work into the natural arc of a story with a beginning (problem statement), middle (solution process) and end (learnings especially from failures) really helps us to understand not just what you did, but what you learned and how well your solution performed.
Also, remember that hiring managers want you to just be yourself in an interview. Sometimes expressing your passion for design and solving problems comes through in examples of projects you’ve taken on outside of work. Tying those examples back to your design practice often helps to complete the picture for us. For example, recently we heard about a designer’s home remodel project. He linked that project to the product design process explaining what he expected and what he learned. Knowing more about him, his life story, and his creative approach to using design thinking outside of work was enlightening.
Step 3: Show Your Work
Showing that you’ve shipped software matters a lot in the interview process. When your user is someone other than your own impression, you have to make tradeoffs and trust real user feedback, rather than rely on your own assumptions about how the product will be used. When designing for real audiences you also almost always have to make engineering tradeoffs to get things shipped (even if you are also the engineer). Ultimately, the tradeoffs you make either alone or with a team during the product design and development phase should make the product experience better. You should be able to describe how and what those tradeoffs and ultimate advantages were in the stories you tell.
We’ve seen plenty of examples of very nicely designed application concepts that solve for a conceptual need rather than an actual one. If you are a new product designer, you can temper this problem with some deep honesty and insights about your conceptual project.
If you don’t have examples of shipped product, you can experiment a bit and turn your projects into interesting case studies. You can do your own user research, for example, and explain what you learned and how you put it to use in your designs. You can also address any engineering or even business and financial tradeoffs that you had to make to get your product made.
One of the worst things you can do during the interview process is to present your concepts as if they were shipped product. What that shows us is that you know that shipping work is important but that you aren’t willing to be honest about your experience, or lack thereof. We’d rather designers fresh out of college or UX bootcamps present themselves accordingly. It helps us set you up for success on our team. Challenging yourself to accomplish things that feel impossible is one thing, setting yourself up for failure is another.
Step 4: Know your Knowledge (and Experience)
Some of the best designers we meet and have worked with didn’t graduate from four year colleges. The best designers, regardless of their educational background, took many small steps over many years to become great and they remain eager to hone their craft.
In other words, attending a 12-week boot camp does not equal experience or greatness. It may be a good start that will teach you the basics of user experience and product design practices and nothing more. Do not apply for senior product design roles after just graduating from a boot camp or even a four-year degree program unless you have 5 or more years of product design experience in the software building space. You simply will not be qualified.
We’d rather see a candidate apply for a role that isn’t open with an honest approach to how they can contribute to our team rather than a junior candidate that applies for a senior role. Unfortunately, the latter approach will often garner a rejection whereas the former will stand out as a unique honest approach worthy of further investigation.
Step 5: Aim for the Top (of the Stack)
“Full stack” has become the way to describe designers who understand and demonstrate all of the necessary skills in our industry. We are always looking for designers who demonstrate excellence in either all (very rare), or part of the stack. Definitions vary from organization to organization. Here is how we think about it.
At Coursera the product designers can move effortlessly from concept to prototypes showing a high level of proficiency in each area of focus including, UX, UI, Systems Thinking, Visual Communication and Branding. We do not require our designers to also be front end engineers. That said, the more familiar a designer is with those skills, the easier their trade off conversations are with engineering during the project process.
We recommend that during the interview process you highlight the areas where you stand out. If your experience and focus is in UX Design, which includes research, box and arrow work, system development, wireframing, and prototyping, show us the best of what you’ve done along with clear problem → solution sets for each project in your areas of focus.The interviewer will appreciate the level of depth you provide, and your passion will shine through the stories you tell.
In our case, the combination of focus and clarity concerning your interests and experience help us determine how and where you will fit in with the team we’re building. If your skills aren’t a good fit at that time, showing us your design superpowers will keep you in the running for future roles.
We certainly do not have the expectation that all designers will be perfect representations of all parts of the stack. We’d actually do a disservice to our teams and to Coursera if we only hired one type of designer. Instead, we’re trying to find designers who complement each other on the team.The designers we hire either have experience working in all parts of the stack, or have a very deep understanding of it..
Final Thoughts
In summary, remember that when you are interviewing, you should be able to tell the story of your design career in a way that intertwines with what the company needs and what your career needs to grow and thrive. Be honest. Be human. And, remember that your passion for the parts of design that you care most about will shine through in the stories you tell.
Siong, Shu and Catherine are here to help continue the conversation. If you are a product designer who wants to talk more about this subject, reach out…and we’ll reach back.
