FAQ - Product Design in 2025
I’m enjoying these FAQ style articles. Today I’m digging into 7 questions that companies have asked me in recent months with the help of Cindy, Garron, Gustavs and Nad.
TL;DR:
How can we (companies) stand out to top designers?
I’m a founder, should I hire a senior person a few days per week or a more junior “do-er”?
What signals actually predict excellence in senior and staff-level ICs beyond a beautiful portfolio?
How do we effectively evaluate a designer's ability to work with AI—whether in the product or in their own workflow?
What interview process feels both rigorous and respectful to world-class designers?
Is it better to hire one 'super senior' designer or invest in two strong mid-level designers with upside?
How do you ensure you’re hiring the right design executive?
There is some serious gold in here. Please do spend the time to read this.
How can we (companies) stand out to top designers?
I get asked this a lot. In April 2025, I interviewed 39 world-class designers about what they care about. Here’s a snapshot of the answers:
Career growth
Strategic impact i.e not just a pixel pusher. Where design is seen as a strategic advantage.
Working with world-class teams. Eng/Product/Other designers.
Culture of bias to action. Getting things done.
They wanted to believe in the product, work on things they use or care about, and avoid "feature factories."
Higher pay, stock options, and financial freedom played a role—but usually alongside other motivators.
Designers valued freedom—of time, location, and decision-making.
Not burning out - Burnout, misaligned leadership, or a company’s failing trajectory led some to make proactive exits.
Hands-on craft work - Some designers left leadership roles or high-responsibility jobs to return to hands-on work, citing a love for the craft.
The worst thing for a designer is join a company under the premise they are going to invest in craft and never get serious about it. This results in the designer getting stuck in an average company, making it harder for them to move into a top-tier design-led company afterwards.
The TL;DR is if you’re serious about hiring great talent, put your money where your mouth is, create the right environment and get serious about design like you do with product, eng, marketing etc.
Now you know what they are looking for your hiring materials needs to reflect that. Identify 3-5 people you want to hire and write the materials like you’re writing to them. These include a job description and candidate deck.
The JD needs to include:
Why they should join the company
Why the role exists
Must have experience
Who the role is not for
Day-to-day work
What success looks like
Interview process
After reading the JD a designer needs to feel excited about working there. Discussing topics like focusing on craft, exploring AI tools, working with world-class engineers and being in a great environment is what’s needed.
The candidate pack is a broader overview on:
Where the design team is now vs vision
Company financials and vision
Executive team - you need to show the focus of the company
Culture
Show the actual work (underrated point)
2. I’m a founder, should I hire a senior person a few days per week or a more junior “do-er”?
Short answer is “it depends”.
Long answer and questions I’d ask:
Do you have design capability already? I.e is the founder a designer?
Do you have time to train a more junior person?
Do you want to be design-led from the start?
Can someone part-time actually help enough to be effective? I.e they are not just all talk, but actually help ship product.
What’s the immediate need? strategy, visuals, systems etc.
Hiring good designers is hard enough, let alone if you are not a designer with no network of designers.
In my opinion at early-stage you need:
A “do-er” but also need someone who understands how to embed design and make it a strategic function and unique difference.
The key is always to find someone with high talent, no ego, hustle and someone who is humble.
Regardless of level someone with natural taste. You can teach tools, not taste.
Here’s a few options to think about:
Fractional leadership
Junior “do-er” (I can’t think of a better way of putting it)
Senior
Hire a more senior advisor or fractional person if:
Need help shaping product vision, positioning and user experience.
Have a more junior “do-er” to get the low hanging fruit out the door.
Someone to help shape what design could look like and the impact it could have.
Hire a more junior “do-er” if:
Have a clear product direction or founder-led vision and just need execution.
Can give constant oversight to ensure things are getting done.
Need to just start shipping and get things out.
Already have a strong product or design partner or someone who understands design. Often a founder.
Don’t have budget for senior people. Something is better than nothing.
The ideal is a founding Designer who has done this before:
Can help shape product vision and take something 0-1
Strong taste, visual design, creativity, UX and systems thinking
Scrappy mindset suited to a start-up
Can work with founders and demonstrated experience
Thrives in ambiguity and no set processes
Here is an article on the Founding Designer role I did with Ivy Mukherjee.
What signals actually predict excellence in senior and staff-level ICs beyond a beautiful portfolio?
From Gustavs Cirulis (Senior Principal Designer at Intercom):
There’s no one-size-fits-all definition of a Principal Designer. Every principal I’ve spoken to approaches the role a bit differently—and that’s exactly the point. It’s a role that flexes based on the needs of the business. It requires high adaptability, proactivity, and the ability to bring clarity and momentum in ambiguous situations.Many of the qualities I look for tend to show up in portfolios—through the attention to detail, the strategic framing, and the way complex problems are communicated and executed.But beyond the work itself, here are the specific signals I look for when interviewing:
Clarity of thought: Can they articulate their thinking in a clear and direct way? That’s essential for influencing others and getting things shipped, not just designing cool ideas.
Range and perspective: Can they seamlessly switch between framing a high-level vision and refining the craft? The best principals don’t treat strategy and execution as separate phases; they see them as deeply interconnected and work fluidly across both.
Cross-disciplinary thinking: Do they think beyond just design? Do they consider business goals, marketing, technical realities? Great principals connect the dots across functions.
Bias to action: Can they walk into a vague problem space and get their hands dirty quickly? Principals don’t stay theoretical for long—they bring clarity through doing.
Active curiosity: Do they ask sharp, thoughtful questions? That shows they’re not just passengers along for the ride—they’re thinking critically, interviewing us, and shaping the conversation.
Self-awareness: Are they honest and direct about their strengths and areas for growth? That level of candor is a great signal for humility and a long-term growth mindset.
How do we effectively evaluate a designer's ability to work with AI—whether in the product or in their own workflow?
From Nad Chishtie (Founding Designer at Lovable):
The best AI designers understand that while context drives models, the most powerful context is always the user. They know how to harness AI for their own work and how to use it when designing AI products.
I skip the usual questions about which AI tools they've used.Instead, asking questions like:
"Walk me through a time you thought AI would solve a problem, but it turned out it didn't. Why didn't it?"
"How do you test or discover AI boundaries?"
"How do you know when AI is solving the wrong problem?"
Great AI designers do two things well:They push tools and models to their breaking point to understand where they fail.
They develop sharp instincts about when to trust AI output and when to adjust it.
They know the experience isn't what the model produces — it's the relationship created between user and system. They spot when AI adds friction instead of flow.When it's performing well in evaluations but failing users in the moment. When the technology impresses but the experience doesn't.
What interview process feels both rigorous and respectful to world-class designers?
Another short answer: it depends.
Long answer:
A task should be used in order to understand how a designer will operate in the context of your company.
There’s 3 types of tasks:
Take home assignment
Time-boxed on the day task
Paid work trial
I think take-home assignments in Product Design don’t make sense for majority of designers.
They tend to focus on execution rather than critical thinking/product sense. You don’t get to speak to customers and don’t have the context, so bias is real. Surely you can get an idea of visual craft through a portfolio and potentially a time-boxed task?
Easy to work through with AI and take longer than expected.
Who has time to work on a 10 hour task these days?
I do believe companies need to see designers work in their context. In a fast moving world where playing fields have been levelled with AI, it’s important to understand, which is where the time boxed task or work trials come in.
Why these work:
Can evaluate a little more when it comes to craft, product sense and understanding, collaboration with others, prioritisation and how you make decisions with a level of ambiguity.
They are usually reserved once the candidate is a strong yes to going through the first 1-2 rounds.
Can identify level instantly through how they control the room and collaborate with others, product sense and understanding and being involved in technical discussions and leadership presence.
No rehearsed answers or speculative work. You see live answers, how they can think in real time.
With paid work trials it’s harder to scale and not everyone has the time of patience to do this. It must be paid.
For me what demonstrates a rigirious but fair interview experience for designers (Senior-Principal) which is fair:
Recruiter screen (30-45 minutes)
First round: Case study (45-60 minutes)
Second round: Timeboxed task + panel discussions (4-5 hours)
Third round: Values interview (45 minutes)
With these rounds you can test for UX fundamentals, product sense, collaboration, systems thinking and working on complex products, communication and storytelling, taste, visuals, creativity. Everything you need to understand if they are a fit or not.
Keep it under 4 weeks, be aligned on comp ahead of time and close within a week after the final interview.
Is it better to hire one 'super senior' designer or invest in two strong mid-level designers with upside?
From Garron Engstrom (IC Design Director at Meta)
The real answer is, “it depends”. But let me break down how.
You should hire the 2 mid-level designers if:
You are building a bench for the long term. Eventually these two mid-level designers, with the right guidance, will become Super IC designers.
You already have another Super IC designer or a very strong manager to support them and help them grow.
These two mid-level designers have different and complementary strengths (e.g. if one is a systems thinker and the other is a visionary. More about the archetypes here)
You should hire the Super IC if:
You have an urgent, business critical project right now. The Super IC will unblock this work with better speed, quality and impact than the two mid-level designers combined.
You already have a team of junior to mid-level designers. This type of team make-up wouldn’t benefit much from another two mid-level designers. But a Super IC stepping into this team would be a force-multiplier, helping those other designers grow, serving as the tastemaker, and setting a strong example of what growth looks like for the rest of the designers.
All things being equal, despite my affinity for Super ICs, I would maybe lean toward the two mid-level designers just from a bench-building standpoint. Again, if there’s already a Super IC in place, this would be a strong move.
How do you ensure you’re hiring the right design executive?
From Cindy Chastain (ex-SVP, CX & Designat Mastercard)
A strong design executive brings deep design expertise, strategic leadership, business acumen, and the ability to navigate complex organizational structures.
A design executive role should, first and foremost, be tailored to meet the needs of a given business challenge. All too often, job descriptions for these roles are too generic and fail to articulate the primary challenge and scope. Not every design executive comes with the same mix of strengths, so you’ll be much more successful at finding the right candidates faster if you have a clear view of the central challenge as well as the kinds of qualities best positioned to bring value to a given business context. It will also ensure the highest degree of success for the person you’re bringing on board.
For example, if you’re a company in the midst of a turnaround or digital transformation, you’ll want a transformation-oriented leader with a track record of driving change.
If you’re trying to elevate design’s role as a driver for innovation and market differentiation, in a business context where the design team is not very mature, you will need a strategic design leader with outstanding communication, storytelling, and influencing skills.
If you’re on a strong growth trajectory and the company has a large and mature design organization, you may want to find a leader with the ability to further optimize the structure and role of design, ensure operational and creative excellence, and extend the value of design to other parts of the business.
If you’re an early stage start up with a need to refine your product offering, you’ll want someone who is a bit more hands on, but also possesses the leadership qualities to effectively deliver on business objectives and grow the team over time.
And if you’re building a design function in a business context that historically lacked design professionals, you’ll need someone with entrepreneurial and consultative strengths, someone who can learn fast and build out a practice that fits with your business model.
There will also be a set of expectations and skills that just come with the territory, no matter the context.
Proven leadership experience in scaling and managing design teams.
Strong portfolio or case studies demonstrating design’s impact on business outcomes.
Deep expertise in product design, with working knowledge of design systems, user research, and AI-driven experiences.
Excellent communication, influencing, and storytelling skills at the executive level.
Business fluency: ability to align design strategy with company goals and financial realities.
And while you may have a very clear view on the business need for a design executive, be open to adjusting those assumptions in the interview process. All too often, the envisioned scope for a design executive is unnecessarily narrow because of inadequate appreciation or knowledge of the full value of design. In fact, taking the time to clarify the potential impact and value of the role within your company will attract the best candidates. In addition to the standard expectations around design leadership, a design executive, alongside a strong multi-disciplinary team, can:
Influence and contribute to product vision, strategy, feature prioritisation.
Be a catalyst for innovation and customer-centric culture change.
Be a thought partner in what the company should do next.
Ensure that design functions as the source of truth on user behavior, sentiment, and motivations, and therefore indispensable for strategic planning and prioritisation.
Be the partner who creates a tangible vision for the future of your products and services, getting ahead of changing behaviors and new technology.
Establish metrics that tie the quality of experience to business results.
Think holistically about the end-to-end customer journey, bridging brand and experience differentiation.
Bring a customer-centric lens on emerging technology.
Thanks Gustavs, Nad, Cindy and Garron for your contributions, I think you will all agree there is some great advice in there.
Until next time!