IBM Product Designer Case Interview (Engineering): Enterprise Design Thinking for Hybrid Cloud

This IBM case interview simulates designing an enterprise-grade experience for a regulated client on IBM's hybrid cloud stack (e.g., Red Hat OpenShift + IBM Software). It emphasizes IBM's Enterprise Design Thinking (EDT) practices—Hills, Playbacks, and Sponsor Users—alongside pragmatic collaboration with engineering and product. Format and flow: (1) Warm-up (5 min): brief intro, role context within IBM Software/Engineering. (2) Problem framing (10–15 min): interviewer presents a prompt such as improving a multi-tenant compliance dashboard for a global bank migrating mission‑critical workloads; candidate clarifies users, constraints (regulatory, data residency, security), systems (on‑prem + cloud), and success outcomes; candidate crafts a Hill statement with measurable outcomes. (3) Research and sponsor-user plan (5–10 min): candidate outlines how they would identify sponsor users, define assumptions, prioritize discovery, and plan lean validation within enterprise access constraints. (4) Concepting and IA/flows (15–20 min): candidate sketches and narrates key user journeys (e.g., triaging policy violations across clusters, approving remediation, and auditing), proposes information architecture, edge‑case handling for scale (hundreds of clusters), and articulates trade-offs for reliability and latency; uses Carbon Design System components/tokens and addresses navigation, notifications, and empty/error states. (5) Accessibility, privacy, and risk (5–10 min): candidate integrates IBM accessibility standards (WCAG 2.2 AA), keyboard and screen‑reader flows, high‑contrast theming, role‑based access, and privacy-by-design; discusses security implications and auditability expectations in regulated industries. (6) Prioritization and delivery (5–10 min): candidate creates a phased plan tied to the Hill and measurable outcomes (e.g., reduce mean time to remediation by X%, increase policy adoption), defines acceptance criteria, metrics, and a playback plan for stakeholder alignment; discusses partnering with engineers, PMs, and Customer Success to de-risk technical constraints (Kubernetes, APIs, data throughput). (7) Playback (5 min): concise summary aligned to EDT—problem, Hill, key flows, risks, metrics, and next experiments. Deliverables during the session are lightweight artifacts (Hill statement, as-is/to-be, sketches/wireframes, IA, success metrics) created on a whiteboard or Figma. Interviewers typically include a Design Lead plus a PM/Engineer; they probe for systems thinking, ability to navigate ambiguity at enterprise scale, Carbon fluency, accessibility and security-by-default, stakeholder communication via Playbacks, and outcome-driven prioritization. This mirrors real IBM expectations for complex B2B scenarios in Software, Consulting-adjacent engagements, and Infrastructure-aligned products.