a situational judgment test for product roles
Know which finalist fits the job
You describe the role once. They answer 12 written situations on their phone, in about 15 minutes. You get this report the second they finish, scored against your job and never against other candidates.
Free while we’re in beta · ten credits · no card
Why this exists
Three good portfolios for one role. Which one do you hire?
By the final round everyone left is plausible. The portfolio shows what went well, always with a team behind it, and a one-hour interview mostly rewards whoever interviews best.
The take-home you stopped sending
Six hours of unpaid work filters by who has free time. Half your best candidates decline it, and the ones who accept produce artefacts you can't compare.
The gut call you can't defend
You know which one you liked. You can't say why in a way that survives a conversation with your co-founder, or a complaint six months later.
The hire you got wrong once
Great portfolio, great interview, and it didn't work. Nothing in the process was built to catch what went wrong.
Fifteen minutes of their time, and you get something you can put next to the interview: how this person decides, and how close that is to what your job needs.
Step one · about ninety seconds, once per role
You say what this job can't do without
Pick the few capabilities this job can't do without. Everything the report says afterwards is read against that choice, so the bar is set by your role.
Step two · about 15 minutes of their time
They answer on their phone, wherever they are
They don't need an account or an install. Twelve short situations drawn from the day-to-day work of the role, in their own time and on any device.
On their phone, whenever suits them
It's a link, with nothing to install. They can pause and come back.
About fifteen minutes
Short enough that good candidates with three live processes still say yes.
Nothing to prepare
The company in the situations is fictional, so nobody works for free.
One sitting, reused
If another company asks for the same assessment within six months, they reuse it.
Step three · the second they press submit
You get this in your inbox before they close the tab
There's no queue and no two-day wait. The report is ready the moment the last answer lands, with a clear recommendation on top.
A recommendation you can act on
It says what to do next and what to ask about. A percentile on its own hands you the decision without helping you make it.
Three questions for the interview
Written from what this person answered. You walk into the call knowing where to push.
It tells you when not to trust it
If we can't read a set of answers with confidence, we withhold the result and the credit comes back. A number we don't believe would do you more harm than no number.
Try it
The same candidate, read for two different jobs
Marta R. answered once. Change who’s hiring and watch the recommendation change, even though the person and the answers stay the same.
Marta R. is a sample profile of an invented candidate. The report format is the one a paying customer receives.
Marta R.
Close to your job
Leads with all 3 of the things you named
What this role called essential
- Spots when the brief is wrongnear the front
- Knows what is cheap to buildfurther back
Ask them to name something they wanted to build and dropped because of what it would cost.
Plainly
What it is and what it isn't
The second column is the useful one. If a product only tells you what it is, you have to guess its limits, and guessing is where things get invented.
| Category | Is it? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A situational judgment test | Yes | Twelve written situations drawn from the day-to-day work of the role. It shows how someone decides when the brief is unclear and the plan changes. |
| Scored against a specific job | Yes | You describe what the role can’t do without, and the report is read against that. The same candidate can be the right call for one job and the wrong one for another. |
| A skills test | No | There’s nothing to memorise and nothing to revise for. It looks at judgment rather than knowledge. |
| A personality test | No | It doesn’t label anyone as a type. How someone prefers to work is described and never held against them. |
| A cognitive or aptitude test | No | No puzzles, no countdown and nothing with a single solution. |
| A coding test | No | For engineering roles it looks at what someone decides to build and what they push back on. Whether the code compiles never comes into it. |
| A take-home assignment | No | Nothing is produced and nothing is submitted for review. Fifteen minutes, identical for every candidate, so the results are comparable. |
| An AI interview | No | Nobody is recorded. There’s no camera or microphone, and no video to watch back. |
| A proctored exam | No | Nothing is locked down or monitored. Candidates sit it in their own time and can pause. |
| A job board or a recruitment agency | No | Candidate profiles aren’t published or ranked publicly, and candidate data is never sold. |
What people ask us
Questions teams ask before they try it
Then you already know its three problems. The results can’t be compared: one candidate spends two hours and another spends the weekend, so you end up ranking availability. It loses your best people, because anyone with three live processes turns down a weekend of unpaid work. And it has no outside reference. You learn which one you preferred, and nothing about whether either is any good. This takes fifteen minutes of theirs and none of your design lead's.
It measures one thing: judgment. What someone does when the brief is wrong, the data is thin or the plan breaks halfway. Craft, tooling and presentation are left out, and judgment is the part a portfolio never shows you. If you want to see their craft, look at their work. That's what a portfolio is good for.
It buys them very little here. There's no essay to generate and no artefact to polish, so a model has nothing to improve on, and it can't know what this particular person would do. When a result can't be read with confidence, we withhold it and your credit comes back.
No. An assessment you can prepare for stops measuring anything. You choose the capabilities that matter for your role, and the report tells you exactly where the candidate stands on each of them. Nobody gets to rehearse the situations.
Every candidate for a role answers the same situations and is read against the same standard, so two people are finally comparable. What changes between two companies is the brief: you say what this role can't do without, and the same candidate can read differently for a different job. That subjectivity is out in the open, and it's yours. If a result ever looks wrong to you, a person reviews it on request.
Fifteen minutes is a long way from a take-home. They're told before they start that there's nothing to prepare, that the company in the situations is fictional so nobody is working for free, and that we look at how they decide rather than how they present. They also sit it once, not once per company: if another company asks for the same assessment in the next six months, they don't take it again.
Then that hire matters more to you than to anyone, and getting it wrong costs a full salary and half a year. Your first candidate is free, with no card. Use it on the process you have open right now.
The beta
Free while we’re in beta
We’re opening a small number of accounts to teams with a role open right now. In return we ask to hear what happened with the hire.
Ten credits
Ten candidates, on us. Credits never expire.
The full report
From the first candidate. There's no cut-down version.
No card
Nothing to cancel, because there's nothing to start.
All we ask back: mark in the panel what you decided about each candidate, and fifteen minutes on a call four weeks in. That data will one day tell us whether this predicts anything, and until it does, we say so.
Take it yourself first if you like: the same 12 situations, about 15 minutes.
Related reading
Read these before you decide
9 min
How to hire a product designer
Hiring a product designer well comes down to assessing decisions rather than screens: whether they reframe a badly posed brief, what they ask before designing, what they cut when resources disappear, how they respond when a constraint changes, and whether they can name the weakest part of their own proposal. Visual craft is necessary, but it's the easiest thing to verify and the least predictive of seniority.
Read it10 min
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
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 it