Why the best hire for a product design role might not be a designer

Most teams hire designers by filtering for hard skills first. Portfolio, tools, years of experience. It’s a reasonable approach. It’s also how you systematically miss some of the best design talent out there.

At Humbleteam, we made a different bet a year ago — and it’s changed how we think about building a product design team.

The journalist who became a designer

A candidate joined our internship program with 10+ years of experience. Not in design — in journalism. No UX/UI background, no visual training, no Figma files in his portfolio.

What he had was something harder to teach: he thought clearly. He knew how to structure complex ideas, build narratives, explain things simply, and find the story inside a product. From day one, that came through in everything he did.

So Humbleteam made a call that most product design agencies wouldn’t. Instead of filtering him out for weak hard skills, we invested in teaching him the craft.

One year later

He designed a landing page for a Tier 1 European football club — a page about the club’s history, where storytelling and visual narrative matter more than almost anywhere else. It’s passed 500,000+ views.

The skills we taught him in a year — layout, visual hierarchy, UX patterns — are real and solid. But the thinking behind the work? That came from a decade of structuring stories for a living. We couldn’t have taught that. We could only recognize it.

What this means for product design teams

The startups and sports organizations that Humbleteam works with — whether it’s a Series A fintech, a medtech platform, or a top European football club — all need the same thing from a design partner: people who think well, communicate clearly, and take ownership of outcomes.

Hard skills in UX/UI design are learnable. Critical thinking, structured communication, and genuine curiosity about users are much harder to develop from scratch. When Humbleteam evaluates design talent — for our own team or when advising startup founders and heads of product on building their design function — that’s the lens we use.

Not investing in people with unconventional backgrounds means systematically missing unexpected talent. And sometimes, that talent is exactly what creates your best work.