I did the BCG design interview for a product designer role on their digital ventures team earlier this year. I have a consulting background (left a boutique firm four years ago to go into design) so I had some context going in. Still found parts of it surprising.
Quick context: BCG has a few different design tracks. There's the internal tools work, and there's BCG Digital Ventures, which incubates startups and products with clients. The loops are somewhat different. Mine was for Digital Ventures.
Portfolio review (90 min) This was the core of the process and it mattered the most. I was asked to present two case studies end-to-end. They specifically asked for one where I worked on something ambiguous from the beginning (no clear brief) and one where I had to navigate a significant constraint or setback.
What they probed in each case study: How did you define the problem? Did you push back on the framing given to you? How did you collaborate with engineering and product? What did you cut, and why? What was the actual impact? (They pushed hard on this. Vague answers did not fly.)
They did not care about visual polish on the slides. They cared about thinking. If your portfolio is all pretty mockups with no rationale, you'll struggle.
Case interview (yes, designers get one) Mine was a design + business case hybrid. They gave me a scenario: a legacy bank wants to improve their mobile app's onboarding experience. Walk me through how you'd approach it. The twist: they also wanted a rough framework for how we'd measure success and what the business case would be for the investment.
This is where the consulting background helped me. Most designers I've talked to who went through BCG got tripped up here because they went straight to sketching or user research without first framing the business context. The order matters: understand the problem, define success metrics, then talk about the design process.
Behavioral + fit (60 min) Two interviewers. Questions around working with ambiguity, navigating disagreement with a product stakeholder, and how I handle situations where the user research says one thing but the business wants another. Also some culture fit questions about working in fast-paced client environments.
I got the offer. One genuine note of caution: BCG Digital Ventures is high-intensity. If you want a steady design practice where you own one product for a long time, this isn't that. Projects turn over fast. Some people thrive in that. Know yourself.