Top Interview Questions to Ask a Product Designer

If you're looking for a product designer, you're probably wondering what questions to ask to find the best candidate. Interviewing a product designer can be tricky - after all, this is someone who will be responsible for designing and bringing your product to life. This blog post will discuss how to interview a product designer and what questions to ask them before deciding. We'll also provide tips on how to evaluate their responses. Let's get started!

When interviewing a product designer, it's essential to ask questions that will give you insights into their design process, experience, and problem-solving approach. Here are some example questions you could ask to get the ball rolling:

• Can you walk me through your design methodology in a few sentences?
• How do you approach solving problems?
• Describe your most impactful project.
• How do you weigh business goals with the customer's experience?
• How do you keep up with the latest trends, best practices, and conventions?
• What do you do when you don't have the answer?
• Tell me about a time when you wanted to give up and how you persevered through that time.
• How might you ship design deliverables if you had a shorter timeline and fewer resources?
• What has changed in your design process over the years?
• What questions do you ask a client that doesn't know what they want?
• What would you have done differently on a project if you didn't have a product manager?
• What are the benefits of having a design system?
• How did you build trust with a team you've never met?

Asking questions like these will help you better understand who the designer is as a person and how they work. Pay attention to how they answer each question - do they seem thoughtful and considered, or are they rushing through their responses? Are they able to provide concrete examples to back up their answers? Evaluating the designer's responses will give you a good idea of whether or not they're a good fit for your team.

Take-home tests are dying out, and progressive companies are beginning to emphasize evaluating portfolios that capture a designer's thinking before bringing them to an interview. If you believe the discussion is going well, shift into questions that shed light on their thought partnership. Share your screen, fire up your product demo, and follow up with questions like:

• What are some of your knee-jerk reactions to the demo?
• What are the first questions that come to mind?
• If you had a magic wand, what would you change about it?
• What would you like to know about the customer?

If all continues to go well, you'll want to get a sense of their design toolkit and working style by asking the following:

• How do you go about arriving at KPIs from stakeholders?
• When do you loop an engineer into your design thinking, and how do you work with engineers to implement your design work?
• Can you describe when you iterated a design based on data or insight?
• How would past colleagues and previous bosses describe you critically but constructively?

These interviews may happen over a couple of chats. You'll want to lay out expectations of the roles and get started with the following steps using questions such as:

• When would be a good day to have a kickoff and project overview?
• Do you have any final questions about the company or me?
• What would you need from me to successfully acclimate to our company?

Thanks for reading! We hope this blog post has been helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us. Good luck with your search for the perfect product designer!