Hire your first product people with confidence
When you're hiring your first product people, a designer, a PM or a researcher, finding candidates is the easy part. The hard part is that nobody at the company can tell a strong one from a well-presented one. A structured assessment gives you an outside reference: the same situations for everyone, read against the profile you said this role needs, and a recommendation you can follow without being from the craft.
What usually happens
You have five candidates. All five portfolios look good, because portfolios are made to look good and because the people who make them are designers. You have no internal benchmark and no design lead to ask, so you can't tell whether you're looking at senior work or a competent presentation of junior work.
So you fall back on the interview, and the interview rewards whoever is most comfortable talking about their work. That correlation with judgment is weaker than most founders assume, and it's weakest where the stakes are highest: at senior level, where the calmest presenter is often the one who has been shielded from the hard decisions.
$40,000
What a wrong first design hire costs a seed-stage company, before counting the four months of product direction that went with it.
The objection we hear
“I'm not from design or product. How would I even read the result?”
That's the reader the report is written for. It opens with a recommendation in plain language, without design or product jargon.
You don't need to know what information architecture is to see the difference between someone who says “we should improve the onboarding experience” and someone who says “88% set up their venue without help; they aren’t lost, they’re tired”. One of those is thinking. You can tell which.
How it fits your process
01 / 03
After the first call, before the final round
Send it once you have three to five people you'd seriously consider. Running it earlier wastes candidates' time; running it later means you've already formed an opinion the report has to fight.
02 / 03
It gives you questions as well as a ranking
The most useful output for a founder is the “main risk” line. It tells you what to press on in the final conversation, which is the part you're good at.
03 / 03
It works for a contractor too
The same case works whether you're hiring permanently or bringing someone in for three months. The failure mode is identical: paying for six weeks before discovering the fit is wrong.
Roles you probably hire
Product Designer
The CEO: “We need a guided onboarding with tooltips. I saw it at a competitor and it works.”
Product Manager
The CRO: “Sales lost three deals this quarter because we don't have SSO. Put it in the next sprint.”
Design Engineer
A product designer: “Just add a variant to the button component, it's a one-line change.”
Questions from startups
That's the strongest case for it. A team that hires ten product people a year develops a feel for it and can afford a mistake. Hiring one means you get a single attempt with no calibration, and that person defines your product for the next two years.
Not with this format. Seniors object to unpaid weekend assignments. Fifteen minutes on a fictional company, with nothing to prepare, is a different request. And they only sit it once: if another company asks for the same assessment, they don't repeat it.
Yes, and it's arguably the best fit. A founding designer or PM is hired for judgment under total ambiguity, which is exactly what the situations put them in.
Read these before you decide
10 min read
Product design interview questions worth asking
Most design interview questions fail because a well-prepared candidate can answer them from their portfolio. Questions that discriminate share one property: they need information the candidate could only have if they were actually in the room, such as a decision that went wrong, a constraint they lost to, or a thing they'd cut.
Read it10 min read
Personality tests for hiring designers: what they actually measure
Self-report personality instruments measure what a candidate believes about themselves, or what they think you want to hear, which in a hiring context comes to the same thing. They predict job performance far more weakly than work samples, create legal exposure when used as a selection gate, and are visibly resented by experienced candidates.
Read it9 min read
How to score a design exercise
Score a design exercise against written anchors rather than impressions. Define three to five criteria, describe what each score level looks like in observable behaviour, fix the weights before you read anything, and require a quote from the candidate's work to justify every score. Then calibrate on people whose ability you already know.
Read it
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