Product Designer at N26: a Figma case study brought three replies in two weeks
I published the case study on a Tuesday afternoon. By Thursday morning I had three replies in my LinkedIn inbox. I had been thinking about looking for a job for a long time without doing anything. My plan was always the same: finish the portfolio first, then start applying. After two months of polishing, the portfolio was still not finished, so I tried the opposite. Take one project, write about it completely, publish it, and let people tell me if it was good enough. The project was a redesign of the onboarding of a fintech company where I did not work. I was a customer and I had noticed three problems. During one long weekend I made a prototype of a flow that solved two of them, built a Figma file with notes on the frames, and published a text of 600 words on LinkedIn explaining what I changed and what I did not touch. N26 answered within one day. Their head of design said the writing was the part that made her stop. Most case studies she sees are only images, with no explanation of the thinking behind them, and she wanted to talk to designers who can explain their trade-offs out loud. The first call was 45 minutes with the head of design. We did not talk about N26 until the last ten minutes. Most of the time she asked how I made specific decisions in past projects: when I disagreed with a PM, when I delivered something that I knew was a compromise, what I learned about onboarding metrics from my own mistakes. I presented three case studies to two designers from the team, one hour in total. They were interested in the decisions in between: why this typeface and not the obvious one, why I recommended removing a feature instead of repairing it. The questions always returned to constraints, not to craft. Round three was a paid exercise at home: redesign their settings flow and document the trade-offs in a written summary, with a limit of five hours. I treated it as a real project, I did not polish it too much, and I delivered exactly what fitted in five hours. The summary was three paragraphs about what I cut, why, and what I would do next if I had a full week. The last round was a conversation of 30 minutes with the CTO. We talked about the role, the team, what they would release in the next quarter, and if I would stay for two years. He was the most direct interviewer in the whole process. The offer was €58,000. I asked once for a higher base salary, and I explained the scope they had described in the final round. They answered the same day with the same number plus a sign-on bonus that covered my relocation. I signed the contract. I sent 18 applications in this whole search. Three of them were the answers to the case study post. The rest went to companies I chose because their product was close to the subject of my case study.