I recently wrapped up a product designer interview at Datadog. Wanted to write this because design interviews at infra/observability companies have a specific flavor that I didn't fully appreciate going in.
A little context: 8 years in design, mix of agency and in-house, mostly B2B SaaS. Applied for a senior product designer role on their dashboards team.
What the process looked like:
Portfolio screen with the hiring manager. 45 min. She wanted me to walk through two or three projects in depth, not a portfolio tour. The focus was: what was the problem, what constraints existed, how did I collaborate with engineering and PM, and what actually shipped. Not what it looked like, what it did.
Design exercise. They sent a prompt roughly a week before the on-site: redesign a specific part of the Datadog UI (they named a real feature). I had two weeks. The ask was a presentation with a clear problem framing, design decisions, tradeoffs, and some high-fidelity screens. I spent probably 12 hours on it. I've done take-homes at other companies and this one was more open-ended than most, which I liked.
On-site round 1: Walk through your design exercise. I had 20 min to present and then 40 min of Q&A. The questions got deep: why this interaction pattern vs that one, how would this hold up with 50 different metric types, how would a new user vs a power user experience this differently. They are sharp.
On-site round 2: Cross-functional collaboration. A PM and an engineer both asked questions. Mostly about how I handle ambiguity, push back on scope creep, and communicate design rationale to skeptical stakeholders.
On-site round 3: Design thinking / systems. They asked how I'd approach building a design system component that needed to work across 12 different dashboard widget types. This was less about Figma skills and more about systems thinking.
The through-line I noticed: they care about designers who are rigorous thinkers, not just people who make things pretty. Datadog's product is complex and technical. If you can't clearly explain WHY a design decision makes a hard product easier to understand, you're not going to do well here.
One thing I'd do differently: I didn't use Datadog's actual product enough before the interview. Use the free trial, understand the mental model of how users think about metrics, dashboards, and alerts. That would have made my design exercise so much stronger.