A designer has underperformed for two quarters despite feedback. How do you decide between coaching further and letting them go?
- A. Give them indefinite time, since firing is costly and disruptive to the team
- B. Assess whether there's a realistic path with clear expectations and a defined timeline, then act decisively either way ✓
- C. Move them to another team so the problem is no longer yours to manage
- D. Keep them on but quietly route all important work around them
Correct answer: B. The right call weighs a genuine, time-bound path to improvement and then acts decisively — not indefinite drift or offloading the problem.
The CEO openly questions whether the design team earns its cost. Your best response over time is to…
- A. Show a portfolio of the beautiful screens the team has produced
- B. Connect the design work to business outcomes and tell that story in the language of the business ✓
- C. Defend the team's craft and remind everyone that design is subjective
- D. Ask other sympathetic leaders to advocate on the team's behalf
Correct answer: B. Design's value to executives is proven by tying work to business outcomes in their language, not portfolios or appeals to subjectivity.
How should you measure whether your design team is succeeding?
- A. By the sheer volume of designs and screens the team delivers
- B. By a mix of outcomes (product and business metrics), quality, and team health — not output alone ✓
- C. By how satisfied stakeholders are with the visual polish of the work
- D. By how consistently the team manages to hit its deadlines
Correct answer: B. Design success is a blend of outcomes, quality and team health; output, polish, or deadline-hitting alone are misleading proxies.
A reorg will split your unified design team into embedded product pods. Your priority as leader is to…
- A. Resist the reorg to keep your design team together as one group
- B. Preserve craft cohesion and career support — a design community and consistent standards — across the new structure ✓
- C. Let each pod go fully its own way to maximize their speed
- D. Quietly keep running things the old way despite the new structure
Correct answer: B. In an embedded model, leaders preserve shared craft, standards and community across pods rather than resisting change or letting quality fragment.
You're scaling the team from 5 to 15 designers within a year. What matters most to get right?
- A. Hiring the most individually talented designers as fast as possible
- B. Building the structure — leveling, managers, process, culture — so the team scales without breaking ✓
- C. Keeping your personal design review over everything the team produces
- D. Maintaining the same informal ways of working that succeeded at five
Correct answer: B. Scaling a team is about the structure, leadership and culture that let it grow — not raw hiring speed or clinging to informality.
Your most talented designer produces great work but demoralizes peers with their behavior. You…
- A. Tolerate the behavior because their output is simply too valuable to lose
- B. Address the behavior directly with clear expectations, holding them to the same bar as everyone else ✓
- C. Isolate them so they work solo and can't affect the rest of the team
- D. Hint at the problem indirectly and hope that they choose to change
Correct answer: B. Holding a high performer to the same behavioral standard protects the team; tolerating toxicity signals that talent buys an exemption.
The CFO asks you to justify two new designer roles. What's the strongest case you can make?
- A. Design is under-resourced compared with similar peer companies
- B. Tie the roles to specific business impact and the concrete cost of not having them ✓
- C. The current team is overworked and morale has been slipping lately
- D. Competitors in the market have noticeably bigger design teams
Correct answer: B. Headcount is won by connecting roles to business impact and the cost of inaction, not benchmarking, morale, or competitor envy.
You must cut one role from the team. On what basis should you decide?
- A. Last in, first out — the most recently hired person is let go
- B. Future team needs, capability and impact — a deliberate, fair, well-documented decision ✓
- C. Whoever is quietest and least likely to complain about being cut
- D. The highest-paid person on the team, to save the most money
Correct answer: B. A layoff decision must be based on future needs, capability and impact — made fairly and documented — not tenure, cost, or avoiding conflict.
When is a formal performance plan the right tool to use?
- A. As soon as someone has a single bad month of work
- B. After honest feedback hasn't closed a real, sustained gap, as a fair, clear path with defined expectations ✓
- C. As a paper trail once you've already privately decided to fire them
- D. To scare a coasting employee into simply working harder
Correct answer: B. A performance plan is a legitimate, fair path to improvement after feedback has failed — not a knee-jerk reaction, a firing pretext, or a threat.
Design is consistently brought in late, after key product decisions are already made. How do you fix this structurally?
- A. Tell your designers to push back harder when they're in meetings
- B. Build senior relationships and earn a seat in early strategy by demonstrating value upstream ✓
- C. Refuse to take on projects that arrive at the team too late
- D. Escalate each late instance individually to senior leadership
Correct answer: B. Getting design upstream is a structural, relationship-driven effort to earn a strategic seat — not per-instance escalation or refusal.
As the team grows, quality is getting inconsistent across pods. What's the best lever?
- A. Personally review every piece of work before it's allowed to ship
- B. Establish shared standards, critique rituals and calibrated managers so quality scales without you as the gatekeeper ✓
- C. Slow the whole organization down until quality becomes uniform again
- D. Accept the variance as an unavoidable price of growing the team
Correct answer: B. Quality scales through shared standards and calibrated leaders, not by making yourself the bottleneck or accepting drift.
A key designer resigns for an outside offer. What's the wise leadership response?
- A. Make an aggressive counteroffer immediately to retain them at all costs
- B. Understand the real reasons, decide whether a counter is truly warranted, and learn what it means for the team ✓
- C. Let them leave without any discussion so you don't appear desperate
- D. Simply match the competing offer and move on as quickly as possible
Correct answer: B. A resignation is a signal to understand — the real reasons, whether a counter makes sense, and lessons for retention — not a reflex to out-bid or ignore.
Another design director is encroaching on your team's scope. What's the best approach?
- A. Defend your territory firmly to protect your people's remit
- B. Align on shared goals and clear ownership, optimizing for the company over turf ✓
- C. Escalate to your shared VP to formally draw the boundary line
- D. Quietly out-deliver them to win the disputed scope for your team
Correct answer: B. Senior leaders resolve overlap by aligning on company goals and ownership rather than protecting turf or competing covertly.
You've promoted a lead into a first-time manager role. How does your job with them change?
- A. Review their designers' work directly to keep the quality high
- B. Coach them on leadership and hold them accountable for their team's outcomes, not the pixels ✓
- C. Let them figure out management entirely on their own from here
- D. Keep making the important people decisions on their behalf
Correct answer: B. Managing a manager means coaching leadership and holding them to team outcomes — not reaching past them into the work or the people calls.
Feature teams are begging for designers, but the design system is decaying. How do you decide investment?
- A. Always staff feature work first, since it's the most visible to the business
- B. Weigh the compounding leverage of the system against feature needs and fund it deliberately, not as an afterthought ✓
- C. Let the system decay until someone finally complains loudly enough
- D. Have feature designers maintain the system informally on the side
Correct answer: B. Infrastructure has compounding leverage, so a leader funds it deliberately against feature demand rather than always deferring or leaving it to spare time.
A kind, well-liked designer is underperforming and everyone knows it. What do you owe them and the team?
- A. Protect them, because morale would suffer if they struggled publicly
- B. Give them the same honest feedback and standards you'd give anyone, with support to improve ✓
- C. Quietly carry their weaker work yourself to keep the peace on the team
- D. Move them somewhere their particular weakness matters a bit less
Correct answer: B. Fairness means holding a likable underperformer to the same standards with support; shielding them is unfair to them and the team.
You're setting goals for your design org. What's the healthiest framing?
- A. The number of designs and deliverables shipped each quarter
- B. Outcomes the team influences, plus team-health and craft goals, owned jointly with partners ✓
- C. The percentage of stakeholder requests the team manages to fulfill
- D. The total hours logged against the highest-priority projects
Correct answer: B. Healthy design goals blend influenced outcomes with team-health and craft, co-owned with partners — not output counts or request-fulfillment.
An executive wants to cut user research to move faster. How do you respond?
- A. Comply with the request, since the executive sets the priorities
- B. Show the cost of decisions made blind and propose right-sized research that fits the desired pace ✓
- C. Refuse outright and defend user research as a matter of principle
- D. Cut it officially but have designers keep doing research on the side
Correct answer: B. The leadership move is to make the risk of blind decisions visible and offer proportionate research — not to capitulate, dig in, or go underground.
Your best IC designer wants to become a manager. What's the responsible way to decide?
- A. Promote them into management, since they've clearly earned it with their craft
- B. Assess their interest in and aptitude for leadership specifically, since it's a different job, and offer a real path either way ✓
- C. Tell them managers are made not born, and just give them some reports
- D. Discourage the move so that you don't lose such a strong individual contributor
Correct answer: B. Management is a distinct role, so the responsible path evaluates leadership interest and aptitude and keeps an IC track open — not craft as a proxy or self-interested blocking.
Your hiring pipeline is strong but homogeneous. As a leader you…
- A. Hire the best available candidates and let diversity sort itself out over time
- B. Widen sourcing, examine the process for bias, and hold the bar while broadening the pool ✓
- C. Lower the hiring bar in order to hit specific diversity numbers
- D. Add a diversity quota that applies only to the final interview round
Correct answer: B. A homogeneous pipeline is fixed by broadening sourcing and de-biasing the process while holding the bar — not passivity, lowered standards, or late-stage quotas.