Team composition

When you first start interviewing designers, you might suffer from unclear role expectations, inconsistencies in our interview questions and unfocused debates about candidates. There is a lot of room to improve, but as an early start up, everyone is so busy wearing different hats that slowing down to rethink this process felt like a bit of a hurdle initially.

1. Learn: Look at every job description you can. Learn from people who’ve built teams (run questions by other leaders). Build an understanding of which skills or traits could be valuable on your team.
2. Analyze: Use that understanding to build a comprehensive list of skills. Filter that list down to skills that the company genuinely needs. Filter that down to skills that the Design team should be responsible for. Then to baseline skills that every Designer needs to know.
3. Evolve: Have you realized a new gap on your team? Has the company’s or team’s needs changed? What do you need right now? When possible, grow people internally.

For point #2 A list of all the skills you need to have your team set up for success and build a skill map.

An example from Figma

Here’s where we landed for the core expectations of a Product Designer at Figma:

We then ran a similar exercise for cultural components of the interview to make sure we brought on people who would be a good fit for Figma, aligned with the company’s core values (Be Bold, Be Inclusive, Have Fun)

We took the list of qualities we wanted and used it directly in our interview feedback form in Lever (our recruiting and hiring tool) to prompt meaningful focused feedback rather than just an open ended text field.