A 30-day plan for your product design interview

You have an interview in a month. The temptation is to read everything, redo your portfolio and memorise a hundred questions. That plan fails, because nothing gets deep enough to say out loud under pressure.

Give every week a single job instead.

The four weeks

1. Foundations. Refresh how you frame a problem, map a journey, sketch a screen and keep a design accessible.
2. Product thinking. Practise choosing what to build, tying design to business goals, and defining what success looks like.
3. Your stories. Pick two portfolio projects and learn to explain every decision and trade-off in them.
4. Out loud. Present, get interrupted, answer behavioural questions and work to a clock.

How to use the month

• Short and daily beats long and rare. An hour a day for thirty days outperforms two weekends of cramming.
• Write things down. Notes made this month are what you will reread the night before.
• Do not chase everything. If a topic is not on this list, it can wait. Depth in a few areas is more convincing than shallow knowledge of many.
• Keep one running document. Questions that stumped you, phrases that worked, numbers you can quote from your own projects.

The questions themselves, with how to answer each, are in the pinned guide “Top 20 UX interview questions and how to answer them” in Community, under Career Advice. This series is the plan around them. The next four guides take the weeks in order. Read each at the start of its week, then spend the days doing, not reading.