FAQ Round 2 - Product Design in 2025
11 questions from careers to future of design leadership
Hello! Here is another article answering questions I get asked through my work. I thought this style of post is nice and actionable for people to consume and I try and get a few expert friends to answer some questions better than I can.
List of questions:
Why do most companies fail at levelling up craft?
What are companies looking for in design management roles in 2025?
I’m interviewing, what can I expect in a case study review?
How can I spot a good design team when interviewing?
Does a design leader need a portfolio?
What are the most common reasons company struggle to hire design leaders?
What are the most common reasons designers leave jobs?
How can we attract great designers to work for us?
What is Growth Design? How do I become one?
Why is design engineering so in-demand?
How is the role of design leadership changing?
Why do most companies fail at levelling up craft?
Most companies say they want to level-up design craft but often fail for 3 reasons:
Money - It costs millions to hire the best designers. Even 3-5 designers will cost over a million in base salary IMO.
Mindset - High quality crafted work is hard to measure and takes time. You have to get a senior executive who truly understands and values craft. All of the best companies have this at CEO/Founder/C-level level.
Environment - some companies are just not set-up for it. There's many things that interfere with doing great work such as bureaucracy internal politics, too many layers, culture of company and quality of other teams such as engineering to actual implement the work.
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.
What are companies looking for in design management roles in 2025?
I recently spoke to a client about how they are thinking about hiring design managers in 2025, and I thought this was worth sharing:
Previously a lot of companies hired managers to do:
Focused on collaboration, process, and guiding execution across functions.
Evaluated alignment to company strategy, cross-functional collaboration, and more traditional longer horizon product planning.
Emphasised mentoring, coaching, communication, and maintaining team culture.
Now in the world of AI and how fast things are moving:
Sharpened to assess agency, speed, and leadership under ambiguity.
Digs into how candidates lead from the front, raise the bar without being asked, and drive executional quality at pace.
We’ve shifted away from traditional collaboration signals toward decisive, high-accountability leadership — with a heavy emphasis on momentum, polish, and tast.
Refocused on original, first-principles strategic thinking — especially in the context of AI transforming how software gets built.
Candidates must show they are shaping strategy, not just interpreting it. We now test for AI fluency, product taste, and the ability to turn vision into execution that matters. It’s less about frameworks and more about clarity, conviction, and foresight.
Tests for performance leadership, change-driving, and team elevation under pressure.
We expect candidates to make tough calls, prioritise high performers, and seek out change proactively. The interview now pushes on leading through ambiguity, raising the bar, and building high-impact teams, not just managing them.
I’m interviewing, what can I expect in a case study review?
This seems to be the key round for companies to understand your level and if they want to carry on the process with you or not.
It’s an opportunity to walk through your work, show how you present your work, your rationale and tell a story as to why what you did mattered in the project.
They don’t want to just see fancy visuals, they want to see how you got to a certain decision.
My advice is come prepared with a recent project you’ve worked on where you can confidently present for 40 minutes that demonstrate what you can bring to a design team and tangible impact you had. Bonus if you can share data on this.
When thinking about creating your presentation, here is what you should be ready to dive into and answers follow-up questions on:
How did you work with peers? Who did you work with? i.e working with engineers to ensure you can actually build it. This shows you understand the steps it takes to ship something.
What did YOU do? Less “we did this” more “I did this” remember they are not interviewing your team, they are interviewing you.
What was your design process for solving the problem?
How did you understand the system you were working in?
Did you explore multiple solutions? What worked and what didn’t?
How did you land on the final solution? What did you do to ship it?
What insights emerged from your research that influenced your design decisions?
Was your work successful? How did you measure outcomes?
What did you learn? What would you do differently if you could do this project again?
Can you share an example of when you had to iterate based on feedback, and how that changed your solution?
Tips:
Who are you speaking to? CEO, CTO, CMO? Adapt how you sell the impact of your work. They care about different things.
Be humble. Don’t BS. Know your level. Come prepared understanding the company career ladder and expectations of the role you are interviewing so you can ensure you’re giving the right level of detail.
How can I spot a good design team when interviewing?
The design leader is a master at design integration. They can advocate for design at the highest business tables. They have high IQ, can manage upwards, can shield the team from politics.
They have strong internal sponsors. Design reports to the correct person in the organisation allowing design to influence at product and business levels. I was speaking to a Exec Board member at a client of mine 2 months ago who said "Even with the cost pressures in the markets, we will not scale down our investment in design. Design is the DNA of the business."
They value design away from pure pixel-perfect UI. They recognise products, services and customer experience are all interconnected. They take an integrated view of their customer journey to create end to end experience for them.
Multiple design discipline. Because they recognise CX, Service, Product is interconnected they understand the need for specialist designers. Content Design, Research, UX, Motion. Designers aren’t expected to do it all. Of course you will have generalists. And they are equal in pay, so many times I see content design is paid considerably less and undervalued.
Strong inter-discipline relationships with brand, marketing, product and engineering.
Equally world-class engineers. I’ve found the best design teams I’ve worked with don’t just outsource engineering they invest in design and eng sitting close together, having engineers who value and understand design and vice versa. I can’t tell you frustrating it is for some designers.
Hire designers from agency and in-house. Value diversity of experience. Not always looking to hire people from the exact same type of companies. I’ve found 99% of the best visual design talent comes from agency or has been in an agency, just my opinion, they are exposed to more, conceptual, branding, complex UI interactions, faster pace. I’ve had a lot of experience placing visual talent, and 99% of the best people have come from agencies some point in their career.
They invest in the hiring process. They invest time AND money into the hiring and onboarding experience. It’s a sign of design maturity when a company invests (money and time) in bringing in a top leader, have separate design disciplines and hire incredible ICs.
Does a design leader need a portfolio?
Short version: Yes it helps.
Long version:
Everyone should have a “portfolio” of some sort. It could be a presentation, a deck, a website or a PDF.
“Portfolios” for design leaders is different to IC, your portfolio should be designed for non-design leaders to understand the value you can bring to the organisation in the top design role.
A design leadership portfolio will look different at different levels:
Manager - Team leadership and ensuring high craft in the team.
Director - Scaling design and cross-functional alignments of peers
VP/SVP - Your influence at executive level
CDO - How you’ve helped ensure design is a competitive advantage for long-term company strategies.
Things to think about when designing a leadership deck/portfolio:
Your team and how you’ve improved the quality of the work - Show the quality of their work, who they are and impact made and how you’ve bought together the right people and helped foster and environment to execute high quality work.
Talk about your approach to craft and how you’ve helped companies ensure they have the right culture, process, investment, and shared understanding to ensure great work.
When it comes to design management I believe more companies are less focused on hiring professional people managers but more leaders who can drive the work and product-focused.
Scenarios and case studies:
Talk about what stage of companies you have joined and the mandate i.e was the company in a state of cost-cutting, innovation or optimisation? What products or services have you been part of that exceeded expectations?
Where have you identified gaps for innovation and achieved successful outcome? Are you someone who can run with something ambiguous and deliver? When/where have you done this?
Hiring and retaining talent:
Discuss the budgets you’ve had to hire. Scenarios when you’ve had to be creative to hire the very top talent, approach to attracting quality designers and leaders and how you’ve designed career frameworks and integrated them to ensure you have motivated designers with clear goals.
Business impact of your work:
Break down your experience in integrating design across an organisation linking it to business goals and driving successful outcomes. How/when have you got design on the map from a business POV, can you break this down? How involved are you in strategic business decisions alongside the exec co?
Approach to leadership:
How you shape and advocate for a strong design culture
How do you define the standard for design?
What kind of leader you are. Are you someone who likes to be involved in the C-Suite, or are you someone who prefers to focus on the team and get in the weeds?
How effective you are with working with wider board members (could you get testimonials?)
What makes you effective as a design executive?
How/when have you got design on the map from a business POV, can you break this down?
(Depending on seniority) How you’ve helped elevate design in an organisation to making it industry-standard and transformed a business from top to bottom.
Examples of your speaking engagements, thought leadership and industry impact.
What are the most common reasons company struggle to hire design leaders?
Reasons you may be struggling to hire design leaders:
You want a unicorn, paying £80k.
The CEO is too involved micromanaging.
You’re conducing a glamour search
You think design is just UI execution.
No-one has heard of your brand.
No clarity on hands on/hands off expectations
You want a "30 under 30" with 35 years experience.
You screen out candidates based on random criteria
You care more about a PR person than actual results.
You don't want a design leader to challenge the status quo.
Reminder: You don’t need to hire a design executive from a FAANG company if you’re a start-up with 20 people.
Each of these points is a topic in itself.
What are the most common reasons designers leave jobs?
A lack of senior people to learn from
CPO or CTO not interested in design
No strategic input in wider conversations
Lack of design maturity inside a company
Designers (and leaders) are underutilised
Design is only being asked to focus on UI
Poor work being shipped out of their control
Unaligned expectations on both sides
They hate what they are working on
They are underpaid for their ROI.
How can we attract great designers to work for us?
Firstly, understand this, it takes time and money to hire world-class designers. They are not cheap. My hunch is the race for the very top percentage of designers is increasing because as it’s a lot easier to build software in 2025 the smaller finer details matter even more so to stand out, so the designers with expectional craft levels can command a high salary/TC.
Do research - understand who is hiring the talent you’re looking for, how much they are paying, ways of working, locations. For example a lot of companies I’ve worked with have found out that having one set location strategy limits talent pools, especially more strategic hires which are business critical.
Show the actual work - People want to see what you’re actually doing. Create a compelling deck talking about the progress you’ve made as a team, vision for design, where design sits in the org, values, other team members etc.
Set an appropriate task, or not at all - I’d be very surprised if the talent you want to hire will be willing to do free spec work for your company. I’m sure there are a few people, but many won’t.
Don't be obsessed about a polished portfolio - Yes, you need a folio. But often your most updated work is on in there. Instead I like to see designers talk through raw figma files, and can think on the go.
Stop the glamour search - Top talent is everywhere. Just because they’ve been at a FAANG company doesn’t mean they are right for you.
Invest in recruitment - If you’re serious about craft, be willing to invest minimum 6 figures into one designer. It costs millions to assemble a world-class team.
Write compelling JD's and adverts - Identify who you want to hire and ask yourself “what do they care about?” and write it like you’re writing to them.
What is Growth Design? How do I become one?
Written by Ìní (Growth Design at Intercom):
“Growth Design is not new, despite its recent momentum. In the introductory class in the Growth Design School course, Growth Design is defined as “the practice of designing experiences that create shared value for the business and their customers with the ultimate goal of driving measurable, sustainable business growth.”
Articles/links on Growth Design worth checking out:
Why is design engineering so in-demand?
Written by Mehmet (Design/Engineer at Attio)
“A few things changed in the industry in recent years. first of all, everyone's computers are more powerful, so there is more space to do impressive things at the intersection of design and engineering, such as animations, 3D graphics. Previously we needed powerful GPUs to run impressive graphics, now they are within reach for the average computer and even smartphone
We also have much better tools that enable the same person to tackle a wider scope of work and responsibilities, encompassing both design and engineering.
But one of the most important reasons is shipping speed and quality. Design Engineering is simply when design AND eng skills are combined in one person. When you have such a person on the team, for example, they are able to go and fix and improve things on your website or app without asking for work from anyone else. I'm able to identify and execute improvements on our website continuously, without involving anyone else.
If you have to involve 2 people rather than 1 to make product improvements, exponentially fewer improvements will happen, and product quality will decrease. This also translates to development speed for new features, not only improvements – I can take for example design sketches, rough ideas, half-finished assets, etc. from our designer and "fill in the blanks" by myself, which is tremendously faster than going back and asking the designer to do more work
How to get into design engineering:
The path is very similar to the path that front-end developers take. in many ways actually "design engineering" is the new word for "front end development". I'd venture to predict that there will be much less frontend jobs, and many companies will focus on hiring "design engineers" (frontend + design + some backend), "product engineers" (frontend + backend + some design), etc. (this is basically the setup we have at Attio)
It makes very little sense to hire a frontend dev who does not have design chops or backend chops (or both) right now breaking down the different types (i.e more design weighted, eng weighted) and how to understand what type of design engineer you're looking for.
The main areas in the context of tech startups are:
a) marketing / website design eng
b) product design eng
c) R&D
R&D is exclusive to larger companies, the first two are across the board, but especially for smaller companies. It should be said that as one goes into marketing vs. product, one also expands into not only design and frontend eng but also the related topics in those disciplines for example as marketing / web design eng I am very interested in SEO, LLM-O, marketing and business metrics, creative direction, copywriting, storytelling and my skill stack expands towards these.
Product engineers on the other hand expand towards backend, reliability, more hardcore software eng, UX, security, performance, etc.”
Here is a Design Engineering 101 from Mehmet on his Substack Design Discipline.
How is the role of design leadership changing?
(Mainly at Head of/Design Director level)
Being a design manager is tough. Anyone else agree? I see it’s changing.
A lot of companies no longer hire professional people managers, but rather leaders who can drive a product forward, be hands-on and can still design. They just happen to lead a team as well.
We are seeing a push towards smaller, higher paid teams with incredible standards so they don’t need as many people which means everyone is required to be hands on.
The trend is now “show me the work” moving away from bureaucratic structure with an emphasis on direct impact and execution speed.
This post from Thom Rimmer (Senior Design Director at Intercom) sums it up well.
Until next time!
If you have any questions you want me to answer, let me know.
It's been quite some time since I read something with such an informed perspective. LinkedIn posts on this subject are out of touch. As a recent design director for a F500 company, it's timely and true. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks, Tom. Fairly comprehensive.
Quick note:
Your thoughts on *Money* are a bit exaggerated.
If orgs need millions of dollars to hire and sustain design, they might be paying the same or even more more already to the engineers. This is about finding the right proportion.
In design, sometimes the investment is too little to see immediate and incremental ROI. For example the time taken to design a poor online form is almost the same as they will take to design a more usable online form. The investment is nothing as compared to the ROI.
Of course there are investments for building those systems, standards, and the teams and I am not even talking about the trade-offs.
My point—not investing in design does not save much, neither the time nor the cost. Not to forget how designers bring their domain intelligence, product intelligence, and the UX and CX intelligence to the product.
ROI is often in the exponential proportion to the small investments—the question is of the timing of those investments.
(Comment updated: Changed *billions* to *millions*.)