I’ll be leaving this interview to warn other designers (product, visual, or otherwise) to be very careful with this one, and get Samsara to really adjust their expectations.
Most of the folks I spoke with seemed really cool. They have some smart people working on the engineering side.
They have no designers, and that’s okay, but they should consider hiring a consultant to help them with getting a true product designer because my interview highlighted to me a BIG misunderstanding of what a designer should be doing.
The structure went as followed:
1) An introduction of the product by lead software dev. Great conversation, answered all my questions about the product
2) An engineer who gave me a basic HTML/CSS/JS challenge, which I completed with ease. This is a competency test, and I get it, but this being the core challenge confused me
3) Lunch with two engineers. This was a nice and thoughtful gesture. The engineers I spoke with seemed pretty awesome. What struck me as odd though was that this was our first time touching base. It would have been nice to join the whole product/engineering teams to get a feel for the cross-team dynamic
4) Spoke with another engineer. She asked me about designs I liked, and I gave her my opinion.
5) Product manager chat is the kicker. The product manager didn’t indicate to me a sense of empathy for the user. As a designer, I understand the importance of balancing customer voice to generate revenue and user needs for retention and actually having a product that’s great to use. The PM didn’t seem to discern a difference. He asked me how I would redesign some emails, which is, of course, difficult without understanding the user’s goals nor context about why the emails “sucked.” I gave him my insight, which should always be taken with a grain of salt when it isn’t grounded in user research. I felt a little apprehensive about these answers.
I felt like my conversation with the product manager indicated to me that design is not part of the core ethos of this company. The problems they are dealing with I am incredibly familiar with—from the design issues in their product and the lack of design leadership. I hope they do not see design as subordinate to PMs simply because their work is not directly tied to revenue.
Samsara, if you’re reading this, listen.
I was told by someone in your company that the role of a PM is different at every company. This is true. However, at the very root of their role, a PM’s goal is to determine, based on their interaction with customers and their understanding of the company’s finances and resources, which features to move forward. This is NOT to be conflated with the user research process.
PMs are often responsible for understanding which features to drive for engineering; product designers/UX researchers focus on refining the user experience. Stop trying to hire “yes” people that will be subordinate to your PM. Designers and PMs are meant to clash because a conflict of interest between customer needs and user needs is inevitable. This is part of the collaborative process in balancing both needs for a kickass product.
Also, read this article written by Google Ventures design partner Daniel Burka, titled, “Stop asking design candidates to redesign your product. It’s unfair and (even worse) it’s ineffective.” Look that up on Google. You need to stop asking for free work because anything we say wouldn’t be helpful, and anything helpful, we should be charging you an hourly consultancy fee. I noticed another designer applied earlier and you too asked that individual for free help. That process is egregious. Instead, create hypothetical scenarios and gauge your potential design candidate’s ability to work with your team.
There are a good number of enterprise design groups that will also be willing to help you out. You might want to tap into the design community in SF and seek the guidance of designers from those groups.
