C3 AI Product Designer Interview Questions
& Process

First I had a take-home assignment to complete. Then, I had two interviews scheduled back-to-back, one was 30 minutes and the other was an hour. The first one was behavioral, and the second one was longer where I had to present my take-home work and do a whiteboarding exercise. I will say the behavioral interviewer was really nice, but one of the two interviewers for the longer interview was pretty quiet.

The interview process was unclear from the start and remained so throughout. The first interview felt impersonal, offering little insight into the company or culture, with minimal conversational exchange. It primarily served as a portfolio review, and an initial screener call would have been more effective. For the second and supposedly final interview, there was excessive pre-interview communication about necessary improvements, making me question why I advanced. This interview was expected to be three hours long and required a PowerPoint presentation and a whiteboard challenge. I assumed the whiteboard was on-the-fly due to a lack of prompt, but interviewers inquired about my preparation. Given the demanding nature of creating a portfolio for a role like this, expecting a candidate with a full-time job to also prepare a presentation and complete additional homework for a company that hasn't invested time in connecting with them is unreasonable. My advice to the company: don't assume everyone is eager to work for you. Invest time in demonstrating why candidates should choose c3.ai. They demand significant candidate effort with minimal reciprocation.

It's a long process, where first they have an interview to get to know your professional history more. Then they send you a task that you have to complete in a maximum of 14 days, after that you present your project that you did for the task, accompanied by case studies you have. Finally, they do a whiteboard challenge, where they give you a prompt and you have to create a design solution based on it. If all that goes well, you move on with a product manager to evaluate how good a cultural fit you are with the company.