Interviewed at Workday for a Staff Product Designer role on the reporting and analytics product area. Sharing this because enterprise product design interviews are their own thing and not well documented.
Process overview Phone screen with the hiring manager (30 min): casual conversation about my background and why enterprise design. She asked specifically about my experience designing for power users vs. novice users. That framing showed up again later. Portfolio presentation (60 min, panel of 3): the meat of it. Design exercise review (async then sync): they sent a prompt a few days before, I designed something, then we discussed it live. Behavioral panel (3 rounds back to back): standard STAR.
The portfolio review
They gave me 60 minutes for the full portfolio plus Q&A. I presented 3 case studies. What they focused on: How I framed the problem before jumping to solutions How I handled conflicting stakeholder requirements What I actually measured to know if the design worked
They were NOT impressed by visual polish. They literally said "we're less focused on how beautiful it looks and more focused on how you made decisions." Very different vibe from consumer product design interviews.
The design exercise
The prompt was something like: redesign the experience for bulk-editing employee records across multiple countries with different compliance requirements. Classic Workday complexity.
I built flows in Figma and presented tradeoffs between a wizard approach vs. a context-panel approach for edge-case handling. We had a 45-minute live discussion where they kept adding constraints ("what if the HR admin is managing 5,000 records"). Felt like a real product conversation, which I liked.
What the behavioral rounds focused on
Lots of questions about influencing without authority, getting design included earlier in the product cycle, and navigating engineering tradeoffs. Standard senior designer territory.
One thing to prepare for: they will ask about your experience with accessibility in enterprise contexts. WCAG, screen reader testing, designing for low vision users. Workday has historically had strong accessibility commitments so this is not a throwaway question.
I got the offer. Base was $165k + equity. Pleasanton-based but hybrid.