Got contacted by the Lead Recruiter for a Sr. UX Designer role. It was a brief 20 minutes call where he tried to understand my skills, my experience and my motivation for a job change. All in all, was good and the recruiter did give me good information about the team right now, and about the company in general.
Round 2 was a phone call with a remote designer, who already had gone over my online portfolio and was pretty happy about what he saw. He did not really ask any questions (as he mentioned that he got what he wanted by looking at my portfolio) and instead asked me if I had any questions. I did ask about the team size, and hiring manager; and got answers to those questions.
Round 3 was an onsite F2F interview with a Consultant VP (who is a friend with the founder). The recruiter welcomed me, and showed me around the floor, and I thought it was a pretty happening office space. She spoke to me about the culture at Medallia, and was generally sweet and polite throughout. The interview was a scheduled 1 hour interview, but it went on for 2 hours and we generally spoke about my process, my style of working, and majorly about my experience working in a Lean UX setup. Towards the end of the interview he asked me if I would be okay being considered for a UX Designer role, and not a Sr. UX Designer role. As per his requirement, a Sr. Designer would have more than 5 years of relevant experience, and has changed more than a couple of times (I have 4 years, and have changed only once). I said okay at that point in time.
Round 4 was one on one interviews with a VP for Product Management, a Product Manager followed by an one hour portfolio review (consisting of 2-3 of my best projects) with the hiring team consisting of the VP Consultant, the remote designer, a product manager. This went well, and the team did not really have a lot of questions to ask after the design review, which I found strange. They did show me a quick demo of their product, and I had a lot of questions to ask towards that. I thought I wouldn't hear from them post this round because of the no-questions after the design review.
The recruiter got back to me, and mentioned that the team wanted me to proceed to the next round which involved a design test. This was a redesign test of their product, and I had a list of tasks to be redesigned as a part of this test. I was given a week to work on this design test ( and it did take me much of the week to complete this one). I assumed a lot of things on the test, as I did not really know how the product worked, and what problems it was solving
Round 5. I was called in to present this design test, along with more one on one interviews, where I spoke to VP of General Counsel, and a Mobile Product Manager. Both went very well. I did a quick whiteboarding exercise with the Product Manager, and he seemed happy with the solution. After these one hour each interviews, I presented my solution to the hiring team (consultant + product manager + designer) over one hour. They appreciated my thinking in terms of approaching the problem, and again did not have much question post this round.
The team got back to me after the weekend, and asked me to share all files which I had presented to the team. I shared them, and waited for a couple of days and reached out again. I spoke to the Designer post the interview - he mentioned that they did not wanted more innovation in the design solution I presented. I asked for a second chance, which they happily gave.
I worked on the solution for a couple of more days, with my idea of innovation. I shared this with the team via email. I heard back from the designer saying that the re-worked on design solution still didn't hit the mark, and they had to stop the process here. He did mention that they would love to run me by the VP of User Experience (who they were planning to get onboard in a couple of months). This last response was pretty unclear to me and left me wondering whether this was the end of the road, or was it another chance for later? Nevertheless I gave up and continued focussing my energy and effort on other startups.
