wrapped up a design loop at mercury last month for a senior product designer role. going to share this because design interview content for fintech specifically is pretty sparse online.
the context: mercury is building banking UX for businesses. their design bar is genuinely high. the dashboard product gets scrutinized by founders and CFOs who have strong opinions about data displays and nothing is a quick win. that shapes what they look for in designers.
portfolio review (60 min, first round): i shared 3 cases. they were most interested in one i had with complex data display work, specifically a project where i had to make dense information legible without hiding it. the conversation went deep on the data viz decisions: why a table vs. a chart, when information hierarchy matters vs. when it gets in the way. bring work that has constraints and tradeoffs, not just polished deliverables.
they asked one question i'd never gotten before: "tell me about a design decision that made the product less delightful but more trustworthy." that's a very fintech-specific question and i wasn't fully ready for it. think about it before you go in.
design challenge (take-home): 5 days, intentionally open-ended. they gave me a brief that was genuinely ambiguous. the deliverable was a figma file and a short written rationale. they didn't want hi-fi polish, they wanted clear thinking. i spent about 8 hours, probably 4 was enough.
final loop (3 rounds): portfolio deep dive round 2, focused on one case from the take-home. cross-functional collab round with an engineer and a PM. they asked how i handle disagreements and how i know when a design is done enough to ship. values round.
what mattered: craft yes, but really the ability to explain tradeoffs without being precious about your output. fintech users don't want cute. they want accurate and fast.
comp was in line with other design roles i've seen at this stage: around 160-180k TC SF-remote depending on equity. i took the offer.