A Few Questions for Your Design Role Interviewer
“You’ll be presenting a couple of projects. Please leave time for us to ask questions and you will have an opportunity to ask some questions yourself at the end.”
Questions! Wow. The tables have turned.
Now what to ask…
It seems obvious that a prospective employee should be able to ask questions, but tech interviews have historically had so much focus on creating an IQ gauntlet that it’s easy to forget it’s not all about problem solving on the fly.
This is a problem! In this market, where it’s more likely that a candidate with decent experience will receive multiple offers (there’s lots of companies doing lots of work and they need more hands), by creating a normal atmosphere where a candidate can ask the questions they want, may really help sell the role.
But sometimes you might forget to ask the questions that you really want to. So I want to share how I think about and prepare for this segment of an interview.
The way that I prepare questions is by starting with a ‘thing I’m trying to figure out’. This could be something that I’m worried, confused or excited about, but I need more info.
Eg. I wonder if its easy to ship things?
- What’s the general steps you got through?
- Something you’ve recently shipped that you are proud of?
- How do you know when something is ready?
Eg. I wonder if I’ll have a decent quality of life if I work here?
- How would you describe the culture? How does the team bond outside of work?
- What’s a typical day look like?
- Do you feel like you have time for deep work?
Eg. What does the work actually look like?
- What are the main priorities for the team right now?
- Do you think everyone has a good understanding of the companies current strategy?
- How is work measured? How are designers measured?
Like all parts of the interview process, it’s more about not shooting yourself in the foot rather than going above and beyond. If you ask questions that are incredibly generic, or things that you could find out with a 1 minute google search, that’s a missed opportunity.
Bonus points if you can ask questions that are specific to the interviewer (“why did you decide to join the company” or “what’s it like to work with you.”)
Good luck!
Product Visioning
Kevin Dame walks through how his team does visioning at Youtube/Google.
The core of his argument: He noticed product managers didn’t have enough time to ‘vision’, which could be summed up as 2-3 year opportunistic bets, that are clear enough to turn into product. Most work at Google falls into ‘versioning’ (small, iterative improvements) or larger initiatives ‘venturing’ like fiber or loon.
Overall, I was a bit underwhelmed by the process that really looks like any other design process, with maybe a few special caveats. Here are my notes.
The core unit for a visioning team is the pair of a strategically minded designer and a researcher. This is because everything needs to be based on unmet user needs, and the designer makes those tangible.
A broader group needs to be involved. This helps get buy-in later, because everyone understands how the ideas were generated.
Visioning might kick start with a broad statement like “how might we support digital wellbeing”. It’s ambiguous, has no problem or solution.
I imagine the biggest problems with this sort of work is the scoping. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed or take on too much. Kevin says the timing and scope are critical. “All forms of engagement” is too big. “Creator to fan engagement” is clearer and resulted in the community tab in Youtube.
Diverge/Converge: 500+ ideas became 8 concepts which he described as ‘ads from the future’. Amazon press release is similar.
A solidified vision has a few components: A value prop, some key benefits, and some signature concepts which could be far reaching like a new content strategy or business model.
I liked these slides that explained how his teams unbundled vague concepts like ‘social’ or ‘interests’.
What does the social landscape look like, and where should we focus? 
A framework to help unpack interests 
Book reviews
Rather than set a goal like “this year I want to read 40 books”, instead I want to review every book I read.
You should be able to see every book I read and review here.
There’s a few reasons for this.
I read some old reviews from a few years ago and really enjoyed the window into how I was thinking back then. I want to be able to do the same in a few years time.
These are public reviews and I have a bit of pride, so I hope that whoever reads them learns something about the book.
To review a book, you need to be able to summarize your thoughts and feelings about a book. To do so, you need to actually read the damn thing and digest it properly, rather than quickly moving on to wherever your attention takes you to next.
So it forces me to read more thoughtfully, and perhaps even choose what I read more thoughtfully. Life is too short to get through a 2 star book that would output a review like “not worth it.”
Here’s my processs. While I’m reading, I take lots of highlights of sentences I like, quotes, and write the occasional note, which could be a question or a statement. When I finish the book, I usually think about it for a while, maybe write a few lines about what it was trying to do or say, and then read a few other reviews on Goodreads. Reading other reviews is sort of like a digital bookclub, you get a wide range of opinions but there’s always a few good perspectives that I hadn’t considered. I write a review, usually trying to include a few quotes that back up my thoughts. That’s it. Total time is probably 10-15 min per review.
So, I’m pro-review now, since before I felt like it was a waste of time.
Persuading the living daylights out of you
Using fear as a persuasive tool is effective, but it’s like bringing a knife to a fist fight. It usually does more harm than good.
Pleasure & Pain
A simple way to think about motivation is the ‘three core motivators’ model by BJ Fogg. The three core motivators are Sensation (pleasure, pain), Anticipation (hope, fear), belonging (acceptance, rejection). You’ll notice there’s a positive and negative side to each motivator. Motivation isn’t the be all end all. Even if motivation is high, the actor still needs to know about it and have the ability to act on it. BJ calls these other elements ‘the trigger’ and ‘ability’.
But when motivation is high, you can get people to do hard things. This concept is interesting to writers, designers, advertisers etc, because we are often asking people to do hard, confusing or strange things that they don’t want to do. Signing up for bank accounts, follow these new twitter accounts or buying organic milk instead of your regular milk.
Scared into action
Crafting a persuasive message is something that humans have been doing for a very long time. Short, unique but easy to understand words, images and keeping the number of topics to a minimum are all decent techniques to transmit a persuasive message.
But fear is like a nuclear bomb. It explodes back thousands of years to a wind swept prairie, where a pack of wolves are encircling your forefathers, gibbering and dripping with saliva. Fear has served us well because it has kept us alive. We remember wolves nipping at our heels, the adrenaline tattooed it onto our brains and we live to fight another day. Fear is also inescapable when it comes to modern, persuasive messages, whether it is the steady stream of covid headlines that we doomscroll or adverts where famous people shame us for not investing in crypto.
Hot (scary) takes
Jordan Peterson often uses negative motivators like fear and social exclusion to drill home his points. I’m picking on Jordan not because he’s a particularly bad offender but because he’s a figure often in the news sharing thoughts and ideas (although most of them are garbled garbage). In conversation with Joe Rogan, they unpack the concept of ‘retiring on tropical island’. His underlying point is true, we should think carefully about what we want our life to look like. We shouldn’t blindly take cues from a Corona billboard. But all too quickly, Jordan throws a number of shameful, fear inducing barbs. If you don’t heed his advice, “you’ll be this pathetic, sunburned, fat, unhappy, hungover…cirrhotic. It’s this 16 year old (boy’s) vision of paradise and it (won’t) work out.”
When he’s persuading young people on the importance of writing, Jordan moves swiftly from general advice to warnings of death. If you don’t think carefully about important issues, your life will be “nasty, brutish and short”. Writing will help you understand other writers, preventing you from “falling prey to foolish fads and whims and ideologies, which can range in their danger from trivial to mortal.” And finally, if you don’t learn to write, “your life will be harder, at the bottom of the dominance hierarchies that you will inevitably inhabit, and you will get old fast.” Death, pain and social exclusion. He’s going all in.
It’s over the top, fearful and negative, but it’s important to consider Jordan’s primary audience: Young, often rudderless men with short attention spans. If he can scare someone to write maybe that’s a net positive?
The backfire effect
We read and listen to these messages because we are attracted and ‘attuned to threats’ (like wolves), but we usually “end up getting depressed and anxious and disconnected.” It’s not even clear that these sorts of messages are effective. We know that when we present people with ideas that rock their beliefs people will reject this evidence, and strengthen their support for their original stance.
Conjuring positive imagery, a “super power” or “magic” or at the very least providing “a solution” can be healthier options.
Fear is everywhere these days, and it’s still a powerful motivator. But too much fear isn’t a call to action, it just makes people scared.
Creativity isn’t fragile
A brainstorm session is no substitute for a healthy, psychologically safe team. In some ways, what was once a fine ‘method’ it has become overloaded – and it’s not weight bearing.
Brainstorms typically emerge in a few different contexts. For example, a working team might brainstorm ideas for the next quarter, helping a PM construct a roadmap. Or, early in the design process, when the solution or problem space is pretty wide open: “lets think about ways to make our messenger product more fun.” Usually these ideas are grouped up, synthesized and voted on. In some cases, like in a design sprint, different team members might sketch or quickly prototype them up.
Co-design Self Collapse
Unfortunately, what tends to unfold looks like this:
- Extroverted white men shout out their ideas the loudest.
- The HIPPO still very much exists, and once their ideas are shared it’s game over.
- Half the room doesn’t contribute – maybe they have too little skin in the game, their work function is too distant from the problem or they are just bored and haven’t had their coffee.
- No one is visibly having fun.
- An extremely rigid structure, like “we have already decided this will be on iOS, and part of the next release – rather than opening it up to different mediums, channels, users etc.
Even in orgs that push co-design, often the average brainstorm fails to meet even basic criteria.
- Co-designers are meant to make decisions, not just suggestions – yet most brainstorming workshops never result in decisions getting made.
- The wrong people in the room. Sometimes these exercises are dressed up as co-design, despite leaving out critical people in the design process “if you’re designing a new youth service and you’ve got adults and young people in different working groups, you’re not doing co-design).”
Copywriters and Art Directors
It’s unfair to blame a single method, or a single meeting. What seems to be happening is that a bad brainstorm indicates a creative culture that is leaking creativity.
One way to tell you are in a very ‘low safety’ environment, is when the design/product team is simply not generating many ideas. Typically there should be a flood of good and bad ideas all the time. In a decent environment, ideas won’t matter so much. In a unsafe environment, the few measly ‘brave’ ideas that float into the public will be sniffed and scrutinized — a symptom of a sick system.
The less creative the workplace, the more creative meetings you’ll find yourself in. When I worked in advertising, where one dumb idea can make or break your career, art directors and copywriters, who were typically on the verge of madness or depression by midday, slung thoughts to each other, or to themselves on a sheet of paper, over and over and over until something sounded like ‘there’s something there’.
I just can’t remember a single session where we were asked to use those little sticky notes.
Robust teams, robust ideas
Just because we need to feel familiar and safe doesn’t mean that creativity is a fragile porcelin dove. Things have got to be smashed so you realize they can (and should be) smashed up.
Whether you are nodding or shaking your head, keep an eye out for some of these healthy signals – or aim to cultivate these with your team.
- The design team has a never ending stream of ideas, weirder and wackier the better.
- People laugh during a brainstorm more than once. People laugh when ideas are risky or dangerous.
- Other functions like to riff on ideas with design, because it’s fun.
- Ideas can get blown up and torn apart. It doesn’t have to happen during critique. This was my experience in design school and I can’t say it’s that common (because of a billion corporate reasons), but trust me it’s a healthy sign! Remember, it “will occasionally be unpleasant—not everyone is always in the mood for small talk or criticism”
- Shitty prototypes, mock-ups, brain farts, parodies, take-downs, fantasy design