“Speed builds momentum, craft builds trust.”

Listen to me saying various hyperbolic phrases like this, as well as the occasional craft and AI-related tip and trick, on the latest podcast episode from the gracious and thoughtful Kedar Nimkar, in his latest Gyaan Project series focused on Craft. Seriously though, it was a fun conversation and a privilege to be included. Thanks Kedar!

I’ve been in hiring mode recently, interviewing lots of product designers, which has led me to further reflect on Kedar’s questions. So I thought I’d offer this follow up framework, applied to assessing product design craft, in case helpful to any product designers actively interviewing at the moment.

When assessing craft case studies I typically focus on three lenses:

1. The Problem

Is there evidence of a deep understanding of and care for the problem being tackled? Is there clear evidence of shaping and prioritising the most valuable parts to solve for and improve? Is the level of complexity and ambiguity in this context broadly comparable to what will need to be tackled in the roles I’m hiring for? None of this is really about the design, but building the foundational context for everything that comes.

2. The Output

Is the experience that shipped to customers high quality? Delivered at pace? UI design details, in prototypes or Figma mocks, are all a useful proxy for this, but only part of the story. There’s always a delicate balance between the future vision and the next design increment. I find this a really key signal in understanding IC seniority, because people can usually speak quite well to it, even if the specific scope of this project got cut / didn’t create the conditions for this to happen.

3. Outcomes

Did these designs meaningfully improve the experience for customers or the business? Metrics are a useful proxy, but I’m more interested in how a designer operates from an outcome-oriented perspective, and the strategic role they play in partnering with product + eng to influence direction. This is a tricky balance to strike. Because outcomes are often seen as defining seniority, it’s possible to over-index here, taking all the airtime away from the raw design output itself.

But ultimately, for me, passing a strong craft interview requires nailing all three of these. In other words, how did someone know they were designing the right thing and how did they design it right?