How we hire product designers at Emotive

Less than a year ago, I was hired as the first full-time product designer at Emotive. At the time, our product team was very small — two product managers, our co-founder/chief product officer, and myself. After my first month at Emotive we took a look at the roadmap and recognized we would need an additional designer to keep pace with the high quality product we set out to build and to support additional product manager hires.

Fast-forward 10 months and our Series B round of funding — we now have a team of six designers! We’ve established a design team culture that is highly collaborative, fun, and low ego. Along with our product managers we’ve defined a design process and areas of ownership and became a design-driven company that truly values well-crafted user experiences.

Building a team at an early-stage startup

Finding the right people can be challenging for any stage company, but early-stage startups have additional pressures to perform under unique circumstances — and you need the right team mates to be able to meet the challenges ahead.

To meet the design challenges we’re facing at Emotive, in a hyper-growth environment, we require someone with a breadth of experience. A designer that can own projects from end-to-end, a generalist product designer.

“At a startup, you need your first one or two designers to be versatile — great jacks-of-all-trades… Not only do they need to deeply understand and think through product strategy, they also need to have good interaction chops and decent visual sense, since they’ll be doing everything from designing the UX to thinking about the brand to designing icons — they need to have a diverse skill set.” — Julie Zhuo, Former VP of Design at Facebook

Our first four hires have all been strong generalists product designers with diverse skill sets and the ability to think through product strategy. Hiring designers at Emotive has been unique from previous jobs I’ve been at where specialists were highly valued to focus on a specific design problem with deep domain knowledge of a business or application, and nearly zero context switching in the design process. Early-stage startups can often be a bit messy and require adaptability and willingness to be scrappy to achieve results. Understanding and supporting an end-to-end flow requires the ability to context-switch and speak to the users needs throughout the journey. Generalists have excellent aptitude to problem solve and go deeper into certain parts of the design process. One day conducting research to understand user pain points, the next day jumping in to facilitate a lightning design jam, and another day executing UI mockups. This is the type of designer we like to hire at Emotive.

Key attributes, aka skillz to pay the billz

Problem solving

In my opinion, this is the most important attribute a designer should have. The critical thinking skills to understand context, ask questions, plan how to overcome problems, recalibrate when you get poor validation, and deliver a solution in a fast paced environment is highly valuable. Demonstrating your complete thought process on previous projects is key during the interview process.

Autonomy

It’s incredibly empowering to be given the opportunity to be responsible for the design outcome for your squad and I love working with designers that can take on this challenge and work autonomously. Generalists typically excel here as well since they understand the range of design tasks and how to prioritize their efforts.

Agility

Early-stage companies make hypotheses, find out we’re wrong, and pivot to other data informed ideas. The ability to create without having completely spelled out requirements or statistically significant data can be exciting for some designers and dreadful for others. Having the ability to deal with ambiguity and change is essential here at Emotive.

We’ve been very fortunate to build an excellent product design team that demonstrates these key attributes, plus unique individual skill sets that have given our team depth and balance.

Our hiring process

When I started interviewing for our first design hire, I made the mistake of having unclear expectations for the role and booking too many interviews back-to-back, which wasn’t a great experience for candidates, or my own sanity. We’ve since made a lot of smart adjustments to our hiring process to allow plenty of time to answer any questions candidates have for us and clearly defined our roles and expectations.

Interview process

We move quickly at Emotive and have a straightforward interview process that focuses on diving deep into the skills we’re looking for. We value great storytelling abilities and low ego personalities. During the interview process we love to ask about outcomes and impact — if your project wasn’t a success, tell us what you learned and would have liked to do differently!

Interview steps

1. Phone screen with our amazing recruitment team
2. Phone screen and portfolio review with design manager (me)
3. Group interview with 60–90 minute presentation sharing 1–2 case studies to a Zoom room of about 4–6 people (designers and product managers)
4. 1-on-1 or 2-on-1 with our VP of Product and/or Chief Product Officer
5. Job offer 🤩

Evidence of skills

We look for an evidence of skills in three buckets –

Product skills

• Do they understand product strategy?
• What are the questions they ask to know they are solving the right problem?
• What is their problem solving process?
• Are they shipping user-centered outcomes?

Craft skills

• Is their typography, sense of hierarchy, and execution well crafted?
• Are they able to follow an existing design system? Have they contributed to a component library?
• Can they handle systems thinking?

Soft skills

• Are they easy to work with? How do they handle conflict?
• Is it easy for others to understand them and their ideas?
• Can they organize and be productive?

Getting your foot in the door

“I have never hired someone or interviewed someone without seeing their portfolio. It is the absolute first thing that I will look for.” — Jenny Arden, Director of Design at Lyft

Your portfolio and resume are incredibly important! 💯 Nearly every applicant has a portfolio these days, but few have great portfolios. A great portfolio should encompass your past experiences, your capabilities, your thought process, how you work with others, and what you’re passionate about. Your portfolio isn’t just a representation of your past work, but a chance for your viewer to know who you are as an individual — each of us brings something unique to our work!

Who we are

We’re a small and mighty design team focused on humanizing the internet. Interested in joining us? Connect with us on Twitter — we’d love to chat 💬 Or view our open product design roles here.

Thanks for reading!

Did you find this hiring process helpful or interesting? We’d love to hear from you. Share with us in the comments or on Twitter @emotivedesign ✌️