Qunomedical

Qunomedical Interviews

1. Mar 24, 2020

   Product Design Lead Interview

   Anonymous Employee in Berlin

   No Offer

   Negative Experience

   Easy Interview

   Application

   I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Qunomedical (Berlin) in Mar 2020

   Interview

   Disclaimer:
   
   The reason why I'm posting a review here is the give executive leadership and others who may apply some visibility over the hiring process. While companies often times make mistakes, the objective here isn't to demean or put the organization down, however, it is to surface what were ethical and simply unfair circumstances to put a person through who had hoped to contribute value for the organizations company and customers.
   
   My initial chat was with an HR person, where the basics in terms of motivations, expertise, and expectations along the lines of salary and start time were discussed.
   
   I would later get back in touch regarding salary expectations, which were apparently reasonable.
   
   I was then asked to join a PM, though of junior tenure, was polite, however, seemed to not have any experience working with senior talent.
   
   From the questions answered and the design of the current product, one can easily ascertain the original designer was junior, therefore, much of the PMs experience or interview, has been tempered by product or design lead mentorship.
   
   Over the call I was told that I would be tasked with a design challenge, which for me, is generally a common problem I see in Berlin and other European markets. The ethical issues of asking someone to contribute, even an hour to spec work, even for a job, is contentious and generally undermining. It also doesn't serve as a proper indicator of one's ability, as it sorely depends on the framing of the challenge itself.
   
   I mentioned that although I'm hesitant to accept the design challenge, I would have a look and consider it as long as we could have open communication around the work requested-an obvious trade off considering there was no compensation for the work.
   
   I was told that she would remain flexible, as she had no experience writing these in any other role, and that she was open to feedback.
   
   After pondering the contents of the design challenge, which I would add for context in the questions below, I began doing research in the relative health and food space.
   
   I did a low- commitment audit using a UX framework I developed and have used in other contract work. It would have been part of my presentation, which I would later request availability for so to justify the design choices.
   
   After exploring high-fidelity compositions based on the hypothesis I had generated in my project app, Asana, I got in tough requesting a chance to present the work. This was my only request given the prior agreement on behalf of the PM.
   
   I was denied a window to share the work and was asked to simply pass the work over with a few bullet points. As contentious as they may sound to some of you, I thought that a video walk-through of the work would serve as a better way of contextualizing the work, while opening up the possibility for a phone discussion to do much more of a deep dive. I wasn't about to give away everything without some sort of compromise, which the PM had original agreed to. Especially as the hand-off of my framework was / is proprietary and could have been used even had I been passed up for the role.
   
   
   I was later declined the role, to my disappointment and surprise, without any specific feedback, in a response laden with grammatical and punctuation errors.
   

   Interview

   Please come up with a new concept and rough mockup design for our homepage, keeping in mind that 65% of our users are mobile users. • You can choose one section that you would like to improve (e.g. just the header) • The design mock-up does not have to be pixel perfect (you should spend maximum 1 hour on the task) • Please document your thought process – e.g. what do you think of the current homepage? What are your hypotheses? What would you like to test further? • Feel free to be creative with your ideas!

   1 Answers