Finished the Starbucks product designer loop last month. Applied for a Senior Product Designer role on the digital ordering experience team. Here's the full breakdown for anyone prepping.
Starbucks has a well-funded design org. The app is used by tens of millions of people and the loyalty/ordering UX is genuinely something they take seriously. That context shaped the whole loop.
The process. Four rounds: portfolio review session (60 min), a design exercise (take-home, 1 week), a design critique, and a leadership/culture fit round.
Portfolio review. They asked me to walk through two projects in depth. The format: 5 minutes to set context, then a structured set of questions from each interviewer. The questions they cared about: How did you measure success? What did you cut and why? How did you handle a disagreement with engineering about what was feasible? Don't show projects where you made pretty screens. Show projects where you made hard calls.
For a consumer app context like Starbucks, they responded most to mobile-first work. Desktop-heavy portfolios will feel out of place.
Design exercise. The prompt was something like: redesign the current customization flow for a Starbucks drink order to reduce errors and increase completion rates. One week, any fidelity you're comfortable with, submit a PDF or Figma link. I did mid-fi wireframes with a written rationale section. The rationale mattered as much as the visuals, maybe more.
Design critique. They showed me two real Starbucks app screens and asked me to critique them: what works, what doesn't, what I'd investigate with user research. This is a real-world design-thinking exercise, not a gotcha. Be specific. 'The hierarchy is off' is weak. 'The primary CTA is visually competing with the loyalty badge and I'd test de-emphasizing the badge on this screen specifically' is the kind of thing that lands.
Culture fit. Questions were about collaboration, navigating feedback from marketing and brand stakeholders (big at a brand-heavy company like this), and how you prioritize when you have 10 things on your plate.
One thing I'd tell anyone prepping. Know the Starbucks Rewards program cold before you walk in. It's the product. Everything the design team builds connects back to that loyalty flywheel.