Organizational Strategy & Culture Topics
Organizational strategy, culture shaping, change management, and organizational dynamics. Includes culture initiatives, transformation, and organizational design.
Team Structure and Composition
Covers how teams are organized, who does what, and how work and accountability are distributed. Core areas include team size, roles and responsibilities, seniority mix, skills distribution, diversity of perspectives, reporting relationships and organizational structure, who reports to whom, and how a role fits into the broader organization. Also addresses cross functional dependencies and integration with other teams, handoff and workflow patterns, decision making models and ownership boundaries, autonomy versus centralized direction, code and design review practices, on call rotations and escalation paths, available resources and success metrics. Leadership and hiring topics include strategies for building balanced teams, identifying skill gaps, onboarding and mentorship programs, scaling teams from small to large while avoiding fragmentation, and setting short term and first year priorities for improving effectiveness. Candidates should be prepared to ask and evaluate questions about immediate peers and managers, domain responsibilities, and how the team is structured to deliver outcomes.
Culture and Values Fit
Assessment of how a candidate's personal values, behaviors, and day to day working style align with an organization's stated mission, values, and cultural norms. This includes demonstrating understanding of how values show up in decision making, engineering practices, and people processes; giving examples that evidence customer focus, ownership, collaboration, inclusion, or other prioritized values; and discussing how the candidate would contribute to belonging and psychological safety. Strong responses also acknowledge any differences, describe how the candidate would adapt or influence culture, and include questions that probe how the company measures and sustains cultural health.
Strategic Design Leadership
Describe how design and design thinking contribute to product and organizational strategy, including elevating design quality, improving design processes, building design systems, and influencing product direction. Provide examples of initiatives that raised the bar across teams, how you measured design impact, and how you embed user centered practices into engineering and product workflows.
Design Advocacy and Influence
Focuses on championing user centered practices and design thinking inside an organization. Includes building buy in for user research, influencing product and engineering stakeholders with evidence and narrative, making the business case for user focus, changing processes to embed research, teaching non designers to use research outputs, handling resistance and trade offs between speed and rigor, measuring the impact of advocacy, and strategies for incrementally growing research and design culture across teams.
Design Capability and Culture
Focuses on building and scaling design skill sets, design thinking practices, and a design minded culture across an organization. Topics include raising design maturity, creating structure for design teams, establishing design standards and practices, measuring design impact, and integrating design as a strategic function. Interviewers expect examples of initiatives to improve design culture, governance models to scale design practice, and ways to demonstrate business impact from improved design capability.