15 minutes, report the moment they finish
Design engineer skills assessment
Twelve written situations, about fifteen minutes, for the role between design and engineering: when a component should exist, which quality lines are worth holding, and how to ship without stopping the release.
The gap
What you cannot see when you hire a design engineer
A GitHub profile shows what they merged. It never shows what they talked the team out of.
The case starts here
“Just add a variant to the button component, it's a one-line change.” — a Product Designer
Every case opens with a request that already contains its own answer — because that is how requests arrive at work. What we measure starts with whether they notice.
What this case shows you
- When a component is new, a variant, or should not exist
- How they trade off system consistency against shipping
- What they do with a design that ignores the system
- How they explain a technical constraint to a designer
- What debt they accept on purpose, and why
Scoring
The same six capabilities, every role
The case changes. The rubric does not. That is what makes a design engineer comparable to another design engineer, and a score meaningful across your whole shortlist.
- Spots when the brief is wrong
- Knows what the data supports
- Sweats states and edge cases
- Knows what is cheap to build
- Explains decisions outside the team
- Holds a position with a senior stakeholder
- Moves without being told
- Keeps going when the plan changes
Marta R. · Design Engineer
Leads with both of the things you named
Reaches first for knows what is cheap to build, with the rest close behind.
How much of their attention this one gets — not a pass mark.
How it works
Three steps.
No calls, no setup.
What must they be good at?
- Spot when the brief is wrong
- Knows what the data supports
- Moves without being told
- Sweats states and edge cases
One credit per candidate, spent only when they start. The first is free — see what the packs cost — and nothing expires, so a role on hold costs nothing.
Related reading
Worth reading before you decide
9 min
How to hire a product manager
Hiring a product manager well comes down to what they refuse rather than what they shipped: whether they interrogate a request instead of writing the ticket, how they size an opportunity with incomplete data, what they say no to and how, what goes first when the deadline halves, and which single metric they would move and by how much. A roadmap shows the output of a hundred decisions and none of the decisions.
Read it8 min
Product manager interview questions worth asking
A question discriminates when a strong and a weak candidate give visibly different answers to it. Most standard product manager questions fail that test because the good answer is public and rehearsable. The ones that work put the candidate in a situation with no correct option — a request that contains its own answer, a stakeholder who will not move, a deadline that halves — and read what they reach for first.
Read it8 min
The PM case study interview: what it measures and what it misses
A product case interview measures structured thinking, communication under mild pressure and comfort with ambiguity. It does not measure what someone refuses, what they kill, how they behave when a plan breaks, or how they hold a position with an executive — and if it runs as a take-home, it also ranks how much unpaid time a candidate had available that week.
Read it
Hiring a design engineer right now?
Invite one candidate and read their report the moment they finish. The first one is free, with no card.