Product Designer

☛ What type of computer software are you custom to using in your designs?

☛ Tell me about a situation when it was important for you to pay attention to details. How did you handle it?

☛ Tell me about a recent successful experience in making a speech or presentation. How did you prepare?

☛ Give an example of a problem which you faced on any job that you have had and tell how you went about solving it.

☛ When given an important assignment, how do you approach it?

☛ Tell me a little bit about your work experience in this industry.

☛ Do you enjoy travel for work?

☛ How well do you know our consumer target market?

☛ Why would you be a good fit for us?

☛ Why do you want to work for our company?

☛ Tell me about a design you really liked, but the design was never created.

☛ How do you go about factoring in safety of the product, when you're designing it?

☛ Tell me about a time when your design had to high of production costs. How did you tweak it?

☛ In a current job task, what steps do you go through to ensure your decisions are correct/effective?

☛ Why develop a new product?

This common product management interview question is meant to test your ability to propose impactful changes to an existing product. Weak answers will either be one obvious improvement or a rambling set of changes which do not move any metrics. A strong answer starts with identifying the goals of the product and the target customers. A key metric or metrics should be identified by which to measure the improvement.

From there, a set of use cases can be identified which will lead to a set of alternatives for product improvements. An important skill to demonstrate when answering this question is the ability to prioritize. From the set of possible personas, use cases, and improvements, select the ones that most closely meet the goals and metrics identified at the outset. Presenting several alternatives at each level is a great opportunity to show creativity and your ability to think outside the box. In some cases, linking to product strategy will be critical to providing an on target answer. Answering this question without building the links between strategy, business metrics, and user needs will result in a random response that will likely miss the mark.

We are invested in our design teams and the design community. We value inspiration, connection, and innovation.

Our design team hosts the Facebook Design Lecture Series where we bring in speakers from diverse perspectives that aim to inspire, elevate, provoke, and educate our entire Facebook community. We host our Artist in Residence program in which we bring in artists and designers to create installations in our workspaces. Our Analog Research Lab offers poster-making, screenprinting and woodworking, and they brings in external classes like TypeCamp. We have meetups like Draw Club, where anyone can come in and join an informal drawing class. We have quarterly hackathons—a permanent part of our product and design culture—where anyone can bring an idea to life and propose it in a few short days. We invest in building and teaching designers the best tools for the job like Sketch, Origami, and Framer.

For me, it’s been crucial to consider developers as my design partners. We work in a fast-paced environment, and products are often designed and built simultaneously; we don’t work in silos. Rarely is there a formal hand off of final designs and specs to a developer team. The best teams work collaboratively. We sometimes might have entirely different skill sets, but they’re always complementary. Often, we have overlapping expertise and interests.

I do my best to bring my engineers in early in my design process so that they can share ideas, feedback and constraints with me.

Likewise, I want to be involved in the development process so I can connect research and share the intentionality behind design decisions, and ultimately help the product get to the best state possible.

Strategy questions require that you put aside product-level considerations and focus on the business and available market opportunities. This type of question is frequently amenable to a diagnostic approach which begins with an assessment of the current state, identifies gaps, and proposes a future state solution. A Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats analysis can be a good place to start.

Focusing on financial metrics and broad market needs (versus individual user needs) will enable you to uplevel your answers. Competition and partnerships come into play more prominently in strategy questions than they may in product questions. A CEO will not be thinking of individual products and perhaps not even product lines. Overall company value proposition and market segment needs will be the right level to consider for this question.