It's so hard to understand how well you and a designer can work alongside each other in a remote environment. So how the hell are you supposed to get signal during interviews when everything is so scripted?
The jam session.
Jam sessions have become my favorite interview for designers.
It's the best way to get a taste of what collaboration could look like with a candidate without asking them to prep a portfolio or do a take-home exercise.
Portfolios are still the best way to present your whole identity as a designer. You get to share full context, craft a narrative, show off your presentation skills, and decide on how you come across as a creative—all key to finding the right fit.
But portfolio reviews show your interviewers how polished your work can be and how well you can present, not what it would actually be like to work with you. That's even more important to determine these days.
That's why we do jams first.
The jam session:
Design candidates bring a previous project or two and show us the mess of ideas, iterations, and failed solutions that they've already tried. Just open up @figma and go. No additional effort required ✨
Successful jams give candidates and interviewers an opportunity to drop their guard and just talk through projects. We get to jump straight into hearing how you explore an idea as if we're already in a weekly design crit together.
And now that designers across the industry have collectively rejected take home exercises (❤️), we found a new way to see your ideation process without asking you to do more work. And it's just more fun.
TAKE HOME: you work alone
JAM: we chat through ideas together
TAKE HOME: you work for hours for free
JAM: we check out something you've already made
TAKE HOME: you polish a quick idea
JAM: the messier the file, the better the discussion
Honestly, jam sessions feel a lot like what we used to do in whiteboard sessions.
You get the back and forth, the light disagreements, to see how they handle wrenches in the plan—without having to ask them to come up with new work.
And they're more remote friendly 😉
I've seen candidates pull out the pen tool and sketch out an idea on the spot in response to a question.
Portfolio reviews and 1:1 scripted conversations don't capture that.
@kevinyien and I tackle design jams together all the time. It's a constant reminder that:
- PMs can be good at design jams—they know how to riff too 😂
- in small teams, everyone needs to be bought into a new hire
- designers who don't care where good ideas come from will go far
I was able to hire incredible design talent previously at Square thanks to jams. And now we've adopted them at @mutinycorp too. They're a big reason I got so comfortable with this team while I was interviewing remotely.
Maybe you'll see how fun it is to work with us too 🤷 🦝
If you're curious about our whole design interview process, we publish our design interview guides so that no one has to come in blind: notion.so/mutinyhq/Mutiny-Interview-Guide-for-Product-Designers-53012e43f7a54bdda3d575cd2456d4f8