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Week 2: think like a product designer, not only a screen designer
Prioritising features, balancing business goals with user needs, choosing metrics, and staying calm when the problem is vague. The week that separates product from visual design.
Interviewers for product roles are listening for judgement. Can you decide what matters, say why, and live with the trade-off? This week trains that muscle.
Prioritising features
Take a product you know and list ten things it could add. Now rank them. Use any simple lens (value to people, effort, risk, how much you would learn) but always say the reason out loud. The ranking matters less than the reasoning, and an interviewer will often change a constraint to see how you adjust.
Business goals and user needs
They are rarely the same, and good designers do not pretend otherwise. Practise naming both for a feature: what does the company want, what does the person want, and where do they pull apart? Then describe how you would find a path that serves both, or what you would raise with the team if you cannot.
Metrics and success
For each idea, decide what you would measure and why. Pair a behaviour measure (completed the task, came back) with a quality signal (time, errors, satisfaction). Be honest that numbers describe what happened, not why, and say how you would investigate.
Ambiguous problems
When the question is vague ("improve onboarding for a banking app"), do not jump to screens. Spend the first minutes on:
- Clarifying the goal and who it is for.
- Naming the assumptions you are making.
- Choosing one area to focus on, and saying so.
Practise this with a different prompt each day, speaking aloud and timing yourself.
- UX Design
- Product Design