Headway Job Interview - Get Ready to Apply!
💎 Are you considering applying for a job at Headway? Get these tips from a recruiter to ace your interview!
📼 Watch this video to prepare for your Headway job interview. In this video, you’ll meet Brehanna Skaletski, Studio Experience Manager with Headway, who will walk you through the process and talk about some of the key questions they ask. When you are ready to apply, you’ll know exactly what the company is looking for!
📼 To ace your Headway job interview, one of the first things to know is that the recruiters are a little less traditional regarding resumes. While you will be asked to upload your resume as part of the online application process, Headway recruiters are more focused on your experience and how it can be applied to the position. Your education and exact background are not as important. What matters is showing the interviewer what you will take from your previous experiences and how you will apply it to the role that you’re hoping to get.
📼 Something to do before your Headway job interview is to become familiar with the application process. Headway has a six-step interview process that starts with an online application. From there, someone from the team will reach out for the first round of interviews. Here, you’ll sit down with recruiters who will ask questions, learn your story, figure out why Headway will be a great next fit for you, and how you and the company can build that journey together. Of course, they want to hear your questions as well at that stage. In step number three, you'll take two assessments. From there, you’ll move to skills exercise and debrief, where you can tell the interviewer what you did and why you did it. The last step is a team fit with a couple of potential colleagues. They will want you to dive in with the team who will be your new coworkers and make sure that you feel comfortable as you continue through the process. Hopefully, this will lead to step number six: receiving your hiring offer!
A Headway Job - What is it Like to Work at Headway?
Like Brehanna says: “We have this quote: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." When you join Headway’s team, you’ll get your onboarding budget to set up your home office with all the tools and equipment needed to be successful. You'll probably start with a team lunch on your first week. Don’t miss Brehanna’s insight on all the fun things the team at Headway does: from weekly lunches to traveling twice a year for company get-togethers!
🧑💼 Are you interested in joining Headway? They have open positions! To learn more, click here.
Get To Know Brehanna
Brehanna is an experienced business development manager with a demonstrated history of working in the nonprofit and healthcare industry. She’s skilled in nonprofit organizations, remote work, sales, marketing, strategy, communications, event management, organizational leadership, and management. In addition, she’s a strong sales professional who’s currently earning a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from St. Norbert College. If you are interested in a career at Headway, you can connect with her on LinkedIn!
More About Headway
Headway is looking for talented and open-minded creatives to help build software that makes a difference. At Headway, they partner with startups and corporations to craft beautiful software through thoughtful, user-driven design and passionate execution. The company values open, honest communication, transparency in all things, and collaboration while working toward common goals for the team and the clients they serve. So what’s it like to be a part of the Headway crew? They're not just developers, designers, and product strategists. They're all consultants, too. Each crew member has unique experiences and skills to help clients and Headway chart a better course for smooth sailing.
Creating Products That Customers Love
Insights from Ariel Meranus, Product Strategist at Headway
Ariel Meranus is always up for a challenge: she spent four years living and working in countries across South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. "I love the challenge of figuring out something or somewhere completely new," she says. "You just have to be willing to dive all the way in."
Ariel moved back to the U.S. a couple of years ago and now works as a product strategist at Headway, where she helps startups and corporations launch new tech ventures.
Although her digital nomad days are behind her, Ariel's thirst for new challenges is a big part of what brought her to Headway. "With every new venture comes a whole new world of challenges," she says."As a product strategist, my job is to navigate that world."
We chatted with Ariel to learn more about how her willingness to try new things—and ask good questions—helps her create products that customers love. Read on to learn more about her path to product strategy and how you can follow in her footsteps!
Ariel's Path to Product Strategy—and Headway
Ariel started her career in brand strategy. "I really liked leading the strategic direction for brands, but I found myself more and more interested in the strategy behind the digital experiences that they were providing." So she decided to take on a new role as a consultant at a digital think tank where she analyzed digital experiences and authored thought leadership on best practices in the digital world.
Enter product strategy.
"That job really inspired me to learn the ins and outs of tech and ultimately to become a product strategist, because I wanted to actually create those digital experiences."
Product strategy is such a new and versatile field that you'll likely get different job descriptions from every product strategist, but this is how Ariel describes what she does: "Product strategy has an incredibly large surface area. It involves everything from upfront market research to generating value propositions and business models, all the way through building an MVP and growing a product at scale," she explains. "All the while, you are talking to real customers, to ensure you're building a product they will love."
After some time working as a product strategy consultant for startups, she stumbled upon Headway. "I got excited when I found out about the role, because I truly believe in the philosophies Headway lives by. The team here believes in building businesses, not just products. And that means doing a lot of tough strategy work, testing with customers constantly, and championing Lean Startup practices."
Creating a product customers love
So how does Ariel help Headway's clients build products that consumers will love? "There's no perfect formula for building a new venture. It's really about having the right belief system -- namely: learning quickly and iterating," says Ariel.
"In terms of a typical project, clients often come to us with an idea. Then, we go out and do a bunch of research into the market to understand: Are there customers for this? What's the market size? What's the competition look like? What do customers actually need? What are they struggling with?"
After validating that they have a problem worth solving, the team starts to design the solution, asking "What do we want to offer?" How will it work?" "How will it make money?".
If customers respond well to the solution, Ariel and her team begin to prototype the idea. "This is where product management comes more into play," she explains. "Now you're prioritizing features and working in sprints with designers and developers to build the product incrementally." From there, the team continues to iterate and optimize based on analytics. This is the stage when growth becomes the main focus.
"I get the most excited about launching brand new products from the ground up and really having the opportunity to be influential as we go from zero to one."
To excel in this process and create a product that you—and your customers—are happy with, Ariel recommends the following.
1. Start small. "People have a tendency to want to spend months or even years creating a robust product with all the bells and whistles before they introduce it to the market because they think it needs to be perfect," Ariel explains."But this is actually a huge bet with a huge investment that's very risky." Instead, Ariel suggests starting small and releasing early, and then building on the product incrementally.
She uses a wedding cake analogy to explain what she means. "Instead of spending six months perfecting a wedding cake before you let people taste it, we release a cupcake after one week. And we're going to serve that cupcake to real people instead of waiting six months to get real people tasting it."
"Then, we use their feedback to create a bigger and better cake over time. At the end, you still have a wedding cake, but you know people will love it because you've had all this opportunity to iterate. You're in a continuous discovery cycle with customers, building things incrementally towards their demand," she explains.
2. Learn from real customer behavior. "It's not about what people say they want to do, it's about what they actually do. I love conducting deep, qualitative interviews. But you want to confirm qualitative insights with real customer behavior data, because we want to make decisions based on what people actually do and not just what they say they'll do."
3. "Don't measure how fast you can build something. Instead, measure how quickly you can learn. Focus on finding answers to key questions: "Will customers be interested in this?" Will they buy it?" Will they use it? Will they come back? etc." she says. "That information will let you know whether you are on the right track or if you should pivot."
Want to work alongside Ariel building products that customers love? Check out Headway's open roles here.
[VIDEO 🎥 ] Top Tips: How to Think Like a Senior Product Designer
Watch time: 6:08
📼 Breanna Clemens, Senior Product Designer at Headway, shares what she's learned during over a decade in the design field. Listen to her tips and prepare to take your career to the next level!
📼 Make sure to watch the video until the end so you don't miss all of Breanna's valuable professional advice!
📼 At Headway, the design team's communication style is all about asynchronicity. One key to success? Breanna recommends building a workflow that reduces the number of meetings; keep your clients involved but stay efficient and respectful of everyone's time. Watch the video to hear Breanna's two go-to tools for asynchronous communication in product design.
📼 Even more, Breanna makes a point of encouraging experimentation and change when possible. Make room for innovation in your projects as it'll go a long way in boosting your career in the ever-changing, fast-paced design industry.
🧑💼 Are you interested in joining Headway? They have open roles! To learn more about them, click here.
