Solving Product Design Exercises – Complete Book Summary & All Key Ideas

Solving Product Design Exercises by Artiom Dashinsky: Your Complete Guide to Acing the Interview

Quick Orientation

In Solving Product Design Exercises, Artiom Dashinsky, a former design lead at WeWork, provides a definitive playbook for designers looking to excel in the high-stakes world of tech interviews. The book was born from Dashinsky’s experience interviewing dozens of designers and noticing a critical skills gap: many were brilliant at aesthetics but struggled to connect their work to business goals. This is the gap between being a good designer and being a successful product thinker.

This summary will comprehensively break down every crucial concept, framework, and example from the book. We will explore Dashinsky’s step-by-step method for tackling any design challenge, from a live whiteboarding session to a take-home project. You will learn not just what to do, but why you’re doing it, ensuring you can articulate your design decisions with clarity and confidence. We will cover the entire process, from understanding the business goal to measuring your solution’s success, leaving nothing significant out.

Chapter 1: Introducing the design exercise

This chapter sets the stage by explaining what a design exercise is and where it fits into the modern tech hiring process. It’s a crucial step that helps companies see how you think, not just what you can make.

The Typical Hiring Process

Most tech companies follow a similar multi-step process for hiring product designers. The design exercise is a key evaluation stage, but it’s important to understand the full journey:

Phone Screening: A short call with a recruiter to check for a basic match in experience, salary expectations, and interest.
On-site or Phone Interview: A deeper conversation about your process, teamwork, and past experiences, often including behavioral questions.
Portfolio Review: You walk a team through your best projects, explaining your process, contributions, and the rationale behind your decisions.
Product/Design Critique (Optional): You’re asked to analyze an existing product, discussing what works, what doesn’t, and how it could be improved.
Design Exercise: The main event. You’re given a design problem to solve, either live or as a take-home task. This is where the book’s framework becomes essential.
Second Interview (Optional): Sometimes used to address any lingering concerns about cultural fit or specific skills before an offer is made.
Offer: The final step.

What is a Design Exercise?

A design exercise is a challenge used to evaluate a candidate’s problem-solving skills in a context that mirrors real-world work. There are three main formats:

Live whiteboarding: A 15-40 minute on-site session where you solve a problem live with the interviewer, explaining your thought process as you go. This tests product thinking and communication.
On-site exercise: You’re given about an hour in a quiet room to solve a problem and then present your sketched solution. This tests your ability to work under pressure with a deadline.
Take-home exercise: You have a longer deadline (from 8 hours to a week) to deliver a high-fidelity design. This is often used to test visual and UI skills.

The type of task usually falls into one of four categories: building a new product, improving an existing one, solving a conceptual problem (e.g., “design an ATM for kids”), or tackling a business metric (e.g., “improve Pinterest’s retention”). Companies use these exercises because they reveal a designer’s true process, critical thinking, and collaborative abilities—skills that a polished portfolio can’t always show.

This chapter emphasizes that the goal isn’t just a beautiful final result. Interviewers want to understand how you approach a problem, how you ask questions, and how you handle feedback.

Chapter 2: How to solve a product design exercise

This chapter is the heart of the book, presenting a structured framework for deconstructing and solving any product design exercise. The key takeaway is to follow a process and resist the temptation to jump straight into sketching solutions.

The Answer Structure: 5W1H

To provide a clear and logical solution, the book suggests using the “Five Ws and How” (5W1H) method to structure your thinking and presentation. Answering these questions ensures you cover all critical aspects of the problem.

Why are we building this? (The goal and business opportunity)
Who are we building it for? (The audience)
When and Where will it be used? (The user’s context)
What are we building? (The solution itself)
How will we measure success? (The metrics)

The 7-Step Framework

Dashinsky breaks the 5W1H structure into a 7-step actionable framework. Following these steps will help you build a thoughtful, user-centric, and business-aware solution.

Step 1: Understand your goal (Why)

Start by framing the problem. Clearly state why this product or feature is important and what business opportunity it addresses. For a new product, you might discuss its potential to improve lives or disrupt an industry. For an existing product, explain how your improvement aligns with the company’s mission and creates value. This shows you’re thinking beyond the pixels and understand the business context.

Step 2: Define the audience (Who)

You can’t design a great product without knowing who it’s for. First, identify the high-level audience categories (e.g., for Spotify, it’s listeners, artists, and advertisers). For the exercise, choose one primary audience to focus on. Then, describe that audience using characteristics like:

Age
Location
Occupation
Mobility
Gender

This step is crucial because it ensures you’re not building something for everyone, but a targeted solution for a specific group with specific needs.

Step 3: Understand the customer’s context and needs (When and Where)

Now, dig deeper into your chosen audience’s world. Think about the environment and circumstances in which they’ll use the product. Ask yourself:

Where are they physically?
What triggers their need for this solution?
What emotions are they feeling?
How much time do they have?

Next, identify their needs and motivations. A powerful technique for this is creating user stories with the format: “As a <role>, I want <goal/desire> so that <benefit>.” This connects an action to its underlying motivation, helping you generate more meaningful solutions.

Step 4: List ideas (What)

With a clear understanding of the goal, audience, and context, you can start brainstorming solutions. List three or four different ideas to show you’ve explored multiple possibilities. Think broadly about the type of product (physical, digital), the platform (mobile, desktop, smartwatch), and the interface (graphic, voice, AR). Don’t settle on your first idea; exploring alternatives demonstrates creativity and thoroughness.

Step 5: Prioritise and choose an idea

You can’t build everything, so you need to prioritize. A simple and effective tool for this is the Impact/Effort Matrix. Plot your ideas on a graph with “Impact” (a combination of customer value, reach, and revenue) on one axis and “Effort” (implementation difficulty) on the other. For a design exercise, choose an idea that is both high-impact and sophisticated enough to showcase your skills. Clearly explain why you chose this idea over the others.

Step 6: Solve

This is where you finally get to design. Using the insights from the previous steps, you’ll bring your chosen solution to life. For a whiteboarding exercise, this means wireframes and user flows. For a take-home task, it means high-fidelity mockups. Focus on one or two key user flows. The book suggests several techniques to kickstart your design process:

Storyboarding: Sketch out the user’s journey step-by-step, from their initial trigger to a successful outcome. This helps visualize the entire experience.
Defining Tasks: List all the actions a user must be able to complete to use your product successfully. This is a quick way to outline the product’s functionality.
Speedy Sketching: Fold a piece of paper into sections and quickly sketch different interface ideas. This forces you to generate a range of visual solutions beyond the most obvious one.

Step 7: Measure success (How)

A great solution isn’t complete until you define how you’ll know if it worked. Propose a few Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that align with the initial goal. This demonstrates a mature, data-informed mindset. Example metrics include:

Task success rate: The percentage of users who complete a desired action.
Engagement: How often users interact with a key feature.
Retention: The percentage of users who return over time.
Conversion: The percentage of users who take a specific, valuable action (e.g., sign up, purchase).
Net Promoter Score (NPS): A measure of customer satisfaction and loyalty.

This chapter provides the foundational process for any design exercise. It transforms a daunting, open-ended problem into a manageable series of logical steps, ensuring your final solution is well-reasoned and comprehensive.

Chapter 3: Questions and Answers

This chapter puts the framework from Chapter 2 into practice with five detailed, step-by-step solutions to common design exercises. Each example serves as a mini case study, demonstrating how to apply the principles in different scenarios.

3.1. Designing a kiosk interface

The task is to design a kiosk for refilling liquid soap and shampoo in supermarkets.

Why: The solution is framed around two value propositions: sustainability (reducing plastic waste) and value (cheaper than packaged goods). This creates a powerful market differentiator.
Who: The audience is defined as eco-conscious consumers, millennials, and low-income citizens—groups motivated by the core value props.
Context & Needs: The kiosk is in a busy supermarket, so the interface must be fast and easy to use with one hand.
Solve: The solution includes a storyboard of the user journey and wireframes for each screen: a promotional welcome screen, a product selection screen with clear quantity and pricing, a simple payment flow, and a final confirmation screen that reinforces the eco-friendly benefits to encourage repeat use.

3.2. A self-publishing platform for Amazon

The task is to design a product for self-publishing a book on Amazon, making it more accessible for first-time authors.

Why: This aligns with Amazon’s mission to be an “everything store” and grows its high-margin Kindle business by increasing the supply of books.
Who: The audience is segmented into first-time authors (who need guidance) and recurring authors (who need efficiency).
Context & Needs: Authors feel excited but also overwhelmed. They need help with everything from cover design and editing to marketing and finance.
Solve: The proposed solution is a wizard-like web application with a master-detail layout. A sidebar guides authors through essential steps (manuscript, cover, pricing) and “nice-to-have” tools (marketplaces for editors and designers). This structure breaks a complex process into manageable chunks, reducing anxiety and increasing completion rates.

3.3. A dashboard for freelancers

The task is to design a business management dashboard for a freelancer.

Why: The growing freelance market needs a tool to simplify administration, allowing freelancers to focus on their work and earn more.
Who: Freelancers are categorized by profession (designer, writer) and work type (full-time, part-time), but the core needs are similar.
Needs: The dashboard must help freelancers answer three key questions: How is my business doing financially? How should I plan my work? What can I do now to move forward?
Solve: The dashboard is structured into three main content areas to answer these questions directly: a financial status section with key metrics, a project status timeline showing where each project stands, and a list of actionable “Up Next” items. This design provides an at-a-glance overview and clear next steps.

3.4. Improving primary health care

The task is to design a digital product to make primary care more accessible.

Why: Improving access to primary care can prevent serious diseases, save lives, and reduce healthcare costs.
Who: The focus is on patients and general practitioners (GPs), whose time is a critical resource.
Ideas & Prioritization: Several ideas are explored, including a doctor marketplace and an on-demand chat platform. The chosen idea, a platform for shared video appointments, is selected for its high potential impact despite its high implementation effort.
Solve: The solution is a white-label mobile app for clinics that allows GPs to conduct group appointments for patients with common, preventable conditions (e.g., diabetes, back pain). This optimizes the GP’s time and makes care more affordable and accessible. The summary walks through the patient’s UI flow, from finding and booking a group session to participating in the video call.

3.5. Improving the ATM experience

The task is to improve the experience of using an ATM.

Why: The ATM experience is dated. Improving it can increase customer loyalty and expand services to underserved groups.
Context & Needs: The summary identifies several pain points with current ATMs: they’re dirty, require a physical card, pose a fraud risk, and can have long queues.
Prioritization: The chosen idea is to transform the ATM into a cash/deposit/printing point where all transaction setup is done via a mobile app beforehand.
Solve: A user prepares a withdrawal on their bank’s mobile app. When they approach an ATM, they scan a QR code to connect their phone to the machine. The ATM then dispenses the pre-requested cash. This flow is faster, more secure (no card or PIN needed at the machine), more accessible, and reduces time spent at the physical ATM.

These examples show how a single framework can be flexibly applied to produce thoughtful, detailed, and compelling solutions for a wide range of design problems.

Chapter 4: How to use a design exercise when interviewing

This chapter flips the perspective, offering guidance to hiring managers on how to effectively use design exercises to evaluate candidates. For candidates, this provides valuable insight into what interviewers are looking for.

Defining Your Goals

Before giving an exercise, a hiring manager should ask two questions:

What skills does a candidate need to be successful at our company?
What skills are we less confident the candidate has after reviewing their portfolio?

Dashinsky recommends testing for a candidate’s weaker areas first to make the hiring process more efficient. For example, if a portfolio shows strong visual skills but little product thinking, start with an on-site whiteboarding exercise.

Choosing the Right Exercise

The chapter outlines when to use different types of exercises:

Take-home exercises are best for testing visual and UI skills, especially for junior roles. They allow you to see if a candidate can produce development-ready deliverables. However, they don’t reveal much about communication or on-the-spot problem-solving.
On-site exercises (like live whiteboarding) are ideal for evaluating product thinking, communication, and collaboration. This is where you can see how a candidate handles feedback, asks questions, and performs under pressure.

Best Practices for Interviewers

To get the most out of an on-site exercise, interviewers should:

Make the candidate comfortable. A stressed candidate can’t do their best work.
Help them if they get stuck. The goal is to see their thought process, not to stump them.
Offer one piece of pushback to see how they handle constructive criticism.
Avoid using your own product for the exercise. This introduces heavy bias and can feel like asking for free consulting work.

By understanding what the interviewer is trying to achieve, you as a candidate can better anticipate their needs and tailor your presentation to highlight the skills they value most.

Chapter 5: Tasks list

This chapter is a valuable resource for practice. It consolidates all the design exercises mentioned throughout the book and adds dozens more. The tasks cover a wide range of industries, platforms, and problem types, from designing a calendar for a globetrotting executive to creating a waste management app for families.

The purpose of this chapter is simple: to give you a bank of high-quality prompts to practice the 7-step framework. The more you practice breaking down these problems, the more natural and confident you will become during a real interview.

Examples of tasks include:

Design a feature for Airbnb allowing a group of friends to plan and book a mutual vacation.
Redesign Waze to support bike rides.
Design a landing page for a physical product that costs more than $200.
Improve Pinterest’s retention.
Design an alarm clock for the blind.

This list is an essential tool for any designer preparing for interviews, offering endless opportunities to sharpen their product thinking and presentation skills.

Chapter 6: Interviews

This final chapter features interviews with five prominent design leaders who share their wisdom on what it takes to succeed in the design industry today. Their insights reinforce the book’s central themes and offer valuable career advice.

Key Advice from Design Leaders

Bobby Ghoshal (Co-founder, Candid Co): Designers must evolve from “user experience designers” to “customer experience designers” by developing business awareness. Understand marketing, finance, and operations to influence the entire customer journey, not just the in-product experience.
Justin Maxwell (Founder, Smith.ai): Designers who want to become founders should focus on three areas: discipline (focusing on what truly matters), people skills (negotiation, storytelling, and sales), and big-picture thinking (prioritizing user needs and business goals over cosmetic appeal).
Helen Tran (Product Designer, formerly Shopify): The most overlooked skill is the ability to bridge the gap between business needs and user needs through research. Always double-check assumptions to ensure you’re building something people actually want.
Joel Califa (Senior Product Designer, GitHub): Treat getting a job like a design process. You are the product, and the hiring manager is the user. Research the company and hiring manager to tailor your application perfectly. Network genuinely to build relationships, not just to ask for favors.
Mia Blume (Founder, Design Dept.): For designers moving into management, the most critical skill is learning to let go of control and become a coach. Instead of giving answers, ask good questions and empower your team to solve problems themselves.

These interviews provide a powerful concluding message: technical design skills are the entry ticket, but success and leadership are built on a foundation of business acumen, strategic thinking, and strong communication.

Key Takeaways

Solving Product Design Exercises is a practical and indispensable guide for any designer navigating the modern job market. It demystifies the interview process by providing a clear, repeatable framework for success.

The Core Lessons:

Product thinking is paramount. The most valuable designers don’t just make things look good; they understand how to solve business problems and create user value.
Process makes perfect. Having a structured approach (like the 7-step framework) allows you to tackle any problem with confidence, ensuring your solution is thoughtful and well-reasoned.
Communication is a design skill. Your ability to articulate the “why” behind your decisions is just as important as the solution itself. Present your thought process, not just the final result.

Next Actions:

Internalize the 7-Step Framework. Practice it until it becomes second nature. Use the “5W1H” questions (Why, Who, When/Where, What, How) as a mental checklist.
Practice with the exercises in Chapter 5. Pick a task, set a timer for one hour, and work through the entire framework on a whiteboard or paper.
Research before you interview. When applying for a job, use the framework to analyze the company’s products. Understand their “Why” (mission), “Who” (customers), and “How” (business model). This will give you a massive edge.

Reflection Prompts:

Looking at your current portfolio, does it showcase your product thinking, or just your visual craft? How could you reframe a project to highlight the “why,” the user needs, and the business impact?
Think about the last product you worked on. Can you articulate how its success was measured? If not, what metrics would you propose?