Product Designer at N26: a Figma case study brought three replies in two weeks

The case study went up on a Tuesday afternoon. By Thursday morning I had three replies in my LinkedIn inbox. I'd been thinking about job-hunting for a while without doing anything about it. The plan had always been polish the portfolio first, then start applying. After two months of polish that clearly wasn't converging on a finished portfolio, I tried the opposite: pick one project, write it up properly, post it publicly, and let people tell me whether it was good enough. The project was an onboarding redesign for a fintech I had nothing to do with. I'd been a customer and noticed three friction points. Over a long weekend I prototyped a flow that fixed two of them, built a Figma file with annotated frames, and posted a 600-word writeup on LinkedIn explaining the trade-offs. N26 replied within a day. Their head of design said the writing was the part that had stopped her. Most case studies she sees are visual evidence with no reasoning attached, and she wanted to talk to designers who could think about trade-offs out loud. The first call was 45 minutes with the head of design. We didn't talk about N26 specifically until the last ten minutes. Most of it was her asking how I'd handled specific decisions in past projects: when ↓