Design teams: Size and culture

At different sizes, design teams tend to behave differently. I can only speak from experience as a designer at five different tech companies, but what I’ve noticed so far is that the biggest differentiator in the “culture” of a design team is not necessarily the product or the people, but in fact its size. The other factors do contribute a good deal, but nothing seems to matter as much as the number of designers on the team, because there’s so many ripple effects on scaling and team dynamics depending on how many designers there are in the team.

I’ve worked in a hardware company where there were twenty-eight designers, a mobile design agency where there were sixty designers, an early-stage startup with three designers, a B2B SaaS company with twelve designers, and most recently, a transportation company in big tech with a hundred and seventy two designers. And sure enough, every single one of them seemed to have a drastically different way of doing things in the design team. Let’s bucket these into a few sizes: the small size design team (fewer than 10 designers), the medium size design team (10-50 designers), the large size design team (50+ designers), and the giant size design team (150+ designers).

The small size design team

In a small design team of less than 10 designers, your culture is largely dependent on the quirks and behaviors of the first few designers who were hired at the company. They made the original branding, design assets, screen layouts, and got used to a certain way of doing things. Every new designer coming onboard tries to “fit in” to the way they did this in order to maintain the design language and consistency in the product. It’s okay to not really have a design system because there’s so few of you and you’re all aware of what everyone else is working on.

You can easily tap someone on the shoulder for feedback and tweak things quickly to get it polished up. You can go out for team lunches and field trips as an entire design team. You can hold one design review each week where everyone’s caught up on what everyone else is working on, with ample time to provide feedback to everyone. Your Figma files can be incredibly messy and no-one will care, because you’re all just owning your piece of the product for the most part and don’t really touch the work of other designers. You don’t really have a component library because the product is still being figured out and you’ve never needed one so far.

In this small team, the skill gaps between designers are very noticeable and because there’s so few of them, there’s also a strong competitiveness underlying the team where everyone’s trying to 1-up each other to try and get promoted. At the same time, you’re also trying to learn from each other and grow together about the early stages of design at a small tech startup. Overall though, you all get along well and respect each others’ strengths and shortcomings. It feels like a small family where everyone knows each other really well.

A lot of tech startups are in this stage and can get away with never really maturing their design team beyond this size. Many designers see a lack of growth opportunities and move on to a different company after a couple of years at a small design team. For the select few tech companies that manage to grow into the hundreds in total employee count, their design teams start getting bigger, and this is where they struggle to maintain the culture.

The medium size design team

The medium size design team of 10-50 designers is where the scaling problems start to arise. You suddenly have a hiring spree of a lot of designers suddenly. The first ten designers were likely hired very slowly. The next twenty designers are hired very fast, typically because of how tech startups raise money in seed rounds and are trying to build out their platforms. The core product is there, but they need a solid experience around support, identity, payments, fraud, marketing, growth, and everything else that comes with fleshing out the product.

At this size, there tends to be a lot of breakage in levels. You could always chat directly with the Director of Design directly in a small size design team. Heck, they were probably your manager. But in a team this big, a Director can’t have forty direct reports, so they start asking their senior-most designers to start managing the junior designers, often even if the senior designers aren’t really a good fit to manage the younger talent. Some don’t even want to manage others (myself included), who they try and lure into it anyway with the promise of a raise and a title change, all so that there’s some sort of pseudo-hierarchy to this elusive product function of “creatives” that typically hates bureaucracy and structure.

The medium size design team is also where you’re forced to standardize your design process into one repeatable pattern. You’ll start to see wildly varying design outcomes from designers working in different teams and quickly realize that there needs to be a solid set of design principles that were never necessary before and that designers need a common understanding of how to build out consistent designs with similar UX patterns. And of course, you need a component library as well as a design system (the two are not the same). There will be attempts made to have a centralized design operations team solely dedicated to creating and maintaining the design system, which will quickly get shot down by the executive board because they don’t “see the need” for it. “The interface looks just fine, our existing designers can handle it,” they’ll say.

The existing designers will make attempts to create and contribute towards a component library. Some will be adding components every day whereas others will never contribute a component in their entire time at the company. It’ll be a solid attempt, but the library will end up being half-organized and disheveled, tough to maintain or update as new designs are constantly being created and old ones regularly changed or tweaked. The design system ends up being left to die when the few dedicated designers who were contributing to it end up leaving the company.

This is the most awkward size for a design team where everyone’s trying to do their best but their efforts aren’t reflected in the product. There’s constant issues with designers not getting along with their managers (maybe because those managers were forced into it and don’t really care about the career development of the junior designers), there’s a lot of burnout and stress because updating the component library is a massive undertaking on top of the product design work, and many inconsistent or differing UX decisions are made that fall through the cracks because the team has outgrown its small cozy size of a few handful of designers.

Making decisions as a team in general is also a bit of a mess here. It’s not possible to hold one big design review for the entire team, so you try a few tactics where you hold a few small sessions in an “open-invite” format, which either succeeds or fails by how many choose to attend or just prefer to continue working in that time instead. Big decisions like changing the behavior of a dropdown or an overlay are hotly debated because some designers will have to redo entire flows or screens in their part of the product. Many senior designers can completely stall progress in these decisions simply due to a difference of opinion, resulting in a shoddy interface that looks different because it’s all still a “work in progress.”

On top of all this, new designers are being added at a rate where it’s impossible for everyone to get to know each other and build relationships, so the design team starts to lose its identity and starts morphing into something else entirely. At this point, the original few designers get disgruntled and reminisce about the “old days” when things used to be simpler. They tell war stories to the younger designers of the one time they had to make github commits to fix CSS errors in production as they down a Blue Moon on a Friday night on the rooftop deck.

The large size design team

When you finally cross into the threshold of truly calling yourself a “large” design team with well over fifty designers, things start to stabilize a little bit. You’ve actually got a good balance of senior to mid-level to junior designers at this point (hopefully, or else you’ve got a major hiring problem) and you’ve hired a small design-ops team to create and maintain your design system. There’s an Individual Contributor growth track parallel to the Design Manager track, and there are more than a few folks with the “Head of Design” title that report up to the VP of Design.

At this stage, you have a respectable design “culture”. There is an established ethos and a way of operating in the design team. There’s an actual identity to what it’s like on the design team, which is actually reflected in the product in the form of copy, tone, language, branding, and the interface itself. You start having specialist roles like Interaction Designer or UX Specialist or Illustrator, and you invest deeply in ensuring that all these people can operate under the umbrella of the design team. It’s now a team that consists of many different skillsets who need to feel like they collectively own the look, feel, function, and form of the product.

Designers in a large design team often find themselves with a little more time and freedom to execute good work, because the teams are better resourced and there’s a design system that a dedicated team is maintaining. For a regular Product Designer in a large design team, there’s less thought and effort required around the UI/UX, freeing them up to spend their creative energy on strategic product thinking and design intent. They push back on Product Managers when something isn’t right and they work closely with UX Researchers to heavily test and validate their work. There’s a good balance of responsibilities here.

In terms of culture, the biggest point of friction for a given designer is that they probably aren’t working on the part of the product or the team or the thing that they want to. A design team this large is only possible as the result of a large and complex product, so it’s inevitable that the most tenured and experienced designers are the ones who end up controlling the look and feel of the most sexiest parts of the interface while everyone else is relegated to designing for a variety of backend support systems or internal tools. These designers either wish they were working on the pieces of the product that have higher visibility or higher impact on end-users.

Aside from that, the designers likely feel that there is a strong path for them to grow into at this size. The managers actually care about managing and try to ensure that their direct reports feel like they’re growing at work. The typical critiques and design reviews are split out into many hierarchical levels where you present to your immediate team of designers first, then the larger cohort, and then finally to senior leadership all at separate times. There aren’t too many HR issues because everyone feels well compensated and are overall quite satisfied with the benefits.

If there’s anything to complain about here, it’s likely the lack of excitement in the work itself. At this size, tech products tend to stagnate and don’t innovate much. They’ve gotten comfortable being successful and growing with the way they have so far, so a “don’t rock the boat” mentality starts to take shape in the culture of the design team. No one even dares to attempt a redesign of the entire UI unless mandated by the VP of Design or if a competitor totally revamps their interface. The work is okay but everyone starts to slowly feel that they’re working on mediocre things. If the overall mission of the company they’re at isn’t engaging enough to keep the designers there, many look to move on to greener pastures.

The giant size design team

Finally, the behemoth. The design team that grows to over a hundred and fifty people. I should note here that I only stopped at this size because this is the largest size of a design team that I’ve worked in. I know there are a few companies that have design teams larger than this, but I haven’t worked at any of them, so I can’t talk too much about my experience at them.

At this size, the design teams operates like a federation. There are strict guidelines and rules on what you can and can’t do in the product. If your design team has gotten this big, it’s likely because the product is very widely used. You probably have the app on your phone or it’s a hugely popular website. The interface is under constant scrutiny by the public and any major redesign floods tech blogs with before-and-after posts of unclear design decisions while Design Twitter lights it up with hot takes and memes.

In such a massive design team, you come to accept that there cannot be one defining culture for the entire team. You come to terms with the fact that there will be micro-cliques and micro-cultures that form in the team and you embrace it. You accept that some teams will want to use Framer to create their prototypes while others want to use Principle. And you’re totally okay with the fact that many others will choose to continue using InVision. At this stage, the company likely has multiple consumer product offerings with lots of offshoot products that need to maintain the high bar for design quality, so you come to accept that every team will operate differently based on the needs of the product.

There’s also little to no handholding of the designers in a giant design team. The designers typically hired into a team like this have excelled in smaller teams elsewhere and are trusted to carry out large, complex projects in the way that they feel is best. The designers are given a lot of autonomy and control over their products, perhaps because the company only got so successful by outperforming its competitors in differentiation through design. A lot of time is invested in user research, user testing, and front-end engineering to ensure that the best vision of the designers is thoroughly vetted and can actually become a reality.

Because of how large the team is, designers in a giant design team can often feel like they’ve moved to a totally different company simply by switching the team they’re on. They’re probably working with an entirely different set of people on a completely different project with wholly new rules of operation. Despite it being at the same company, it can feel very different. And this in turn keeps designers at these companies longer. If you ever get bored, you don’t need to leave the company, you can just switch your team. Keep your massive paycheck and your great benefits, just change up what you’re doing. On the flip side, this does leave these designers very tunnel-visioned about the industry at large and puts them in a place where they have a tough time tackling problems that don’t directly relate to what they’ve been doing at their company for the past several years.

With the burden of a giant design team comes the overbearing weight of documentation. You cannot simply complete a design, hand it off, and move on to the next thing. Every design decision and intent needs to be documented for anyone else even considering touching or tweaking the feature. Detailed write-ups about experiments, data modeling, variant testing, and copywriting isn’t uncommon in design teams this large. It needs to be written up so well that even a non-designer can look at it and understand how the system works, what the intent was, and what the design process was. Figma files need to be in tip-top shape with properly instanced layer names and robust components. Any new illustration or additions to the design system need to be updated. The project just needs to be in a really, really solid place so that anyone else taking over can feel comfortable doing so.

This goes without saying, but the giant design team also has a dedicated, properly resourced design operations team that’s killing it with ensuring that everything is spic-and-span. Their work isn’t just scrutinized by the public, but by the internal designers too. The people who get hired as Product Designers at these companies don’t have much of a say in what the buttons look like or what the brand values should be. They simply build off of the existing work because all of those things have already been figured out by the design operations team, which can have as many as twenty to thirty people with sub-teams for mobile, web, email, and marketing.

Getting into a team like this can be very difficult because the hiring process tends to be extremely rigorous. Not only do you have to prove that you can operate at the same level (often better) as the existing designers, but you have to bring something new and an expertise in a lacking skillset on the team that you’re interviewing in. The skillset fit is so difficult to find that it’s not unheard of for companies to fly in candidates from all around the country for interview rounds that can stretch for months before they make a decision.

The designers on giant design teams like these are often very well compensated (amongst the highest tiers of design salaries, actually). And this is where they tend to “coast” the most, i.e., stop growing and just do what’s required to keep moving forward. The skillset gap between designers is far less obvious here because of the big difference in teams and products; you can never attribute the shortcomings of a project to just the designer alone, it could’ve been the team dynamics or the product itself or something else. So you end up with this weird mix of highly talented, extremely skilled designers who are perfectionists in their craft along with a bunch of mediocre, acceptable, and not-so-great designers whose output suffers because they either got unlucky by being put on the wrong projects and teams or they simply weren’t that great to begin with.

Size and culture

So yeah, it’s wild how different your experience as a designer is if you’ve spent the past five years working at a tech startup or if you worked at a tech giant in Silicon Valley. You gain a completely different set of skills while still having the same job title. It’s nuts how heavily your personal growth is impacted by a factor as seemingly small as the sheer size of the design team that you’re joining. It’s crazy to come to the realization that if the team grows while you’re there, the culture will completely shift and that you’ll be forced to drop the growth track you were on at the original size of the design team and instead adopt a brand new culture respective to the new size of the design team.

I’ve tried to make the most of my twenties and have attempted to experience what it’s like to work in a wide variety of places. Granted, they’re all tech companies so I’m still in a massive bubble, but at least I got to see the huge differences in working as a designer on teams small and large. I don’t think there’s one optimal size for any design team. There’s too many factors at play to make that call. The only thing we know for sure is that, barring a massive layoff or financial difficulties, the design team will continue to grow. The company must adapt to the new size and ready themselves for a new set of challenges. Many go through it completely unprepared and caught off guard by how quickly it’s happening. It’s normal and natural. The best thing to do is ensure that you keep the culture appropriate for the size of the design team you have.