Are We Judging Designers on Vibes?
I keep trying to figure out how to actually tell if a product designer is good. Not "has a nice portfolio" good — actually good. The obvious answers don't survive contact.
Years of experience
Years of experiance feels like it should count, until you realize you can do the same year of work fifteen times and never mature — like someone who's had the emotional range of a toddler for thirty years. Time isn't the same as growth, and nothing about a tenure number tells you which one you're looking at.
Brand names.
Brand names are worse. A big logo on a resume often says more about privilege than skill — you were born in the right city, or your uni placed you as an intern somewhere good, or a friend got you into Meta. None of that means you got sharper while you were there. It might just mean you sat somewhere prestigious for a few years without anyone pushing you to grow.
Range.
Range is trickier because it cuts both ways. It can be real evidence of diverse thinking, someone who's actually built a flexible mental toolkit. Or it can be shallowness wearing a more flattering name — a lot of surfaces touched, nothing gone deep on. You genuinely can't tell which one you're looking at from a job title.
Founder.
Founder or early-startup experience has the same problem in a different shape. It can build real skill under real pressure. It can also just be trauma — chaos that never resolved into anything transferable, just scar tissue that looks like experience from the outside.
Public Speaker.
Speaking experience? I used to think this counted for something. It doesn't, really — it tells you someone applied to speak and did the PR to get accepted. That's a different skill than having something worth saying.
Even a beautiful portfolio site isn't proof. It proves taste, and maybe patience. It doesn't prove judgment.
So I kept asking — what's actually left, once you take all of that away?
What's actually left?
What I landed on is signals that are expensive to fake, because faking them requires you to have actually held real tension in your head. Can someone tell you what they considered and rejected, and why — not just narrate the thing they shipped? Do they have a real story of being wrong, with evidence, where they changed their mind — not "we iterated," an actual reversal? Have they said no to something a stakeholder wanted, and can they tell you what that cost them?
Does it work?
But even this isn't clean. Can the person judging actually recognize depth when they hear it? A tradeoff only sounds sharp if you understand the constraints it was made inside — the politics, the tech debt, the six other things competing for the same quarter. Most of that context doesn't survive a thirty-minute interview. You can't hand someone the whole iceberg in a conversation; you can only describe the tip and hope they've stood somewhere cold enough to recognize the shape of the rest. The kind of depth I'm describing is really only visible to someone who worked the same problem alongside you — and that's exactly the thing a whiteboard exercise can never replicate.
Designer's Curse
And design has a specific version of this problem. PMs get to point at a metric. Engineers get to point at system performance holding up under load. Designers are stuck defending something closer to taste — an aesthetic judgment that's real but doesn't reduce to a number. What's actually left, most of the time, is just how people feel using the thing. And there's no KPI for that.
Which maybe means the honest answer is: you mostly can't tell, not quickly, not from the outside. So the first judgment almost never gets made on any of it. It gets made on vibes — a confident opening paragraph, a nice site, a familiar company name in bold. We tell ourselves we're evaluating judgment. Mostly we're pattern-matching on thirty seconds of polish, same as everyone else, including me.
