Teams

I'm a huge fan of teams...it probably started with being from a family of six kids and then grew in Little League, then high school concert band and soccer, etc.

Today, I manage a team of user experience professionals and we rely on each other to be successful. Really though, we are part of even bigger teams and are dependent on Product Managers, Engineers, Marketing partners, compliance, and on and on. To be honest...there is very little we can accomplish without others.

Design Teams

When it comes to building design teams there are a few things I've learned along the way or have seen work for others. There are several factors that influence how design teams are built and the rate at which they scale. Below are a few factors that I see that determine the pace of a growing design team.

Financial: The general financial success and growth of a company is always a huge determining factor, but success isn't always enough to make a case for expanding a team.
Work: The goals and plans of a particular business can only be executed if the appropriate amount of resources are available to do the work. Based on the number of the initiatives, projects, and timelines, one can estimate the resources needed to be successful.
Industry: See what other companies in the same industry as yours look like, taking into account the size of their business and how long they've been around. This approach can give you a good idea of how many designers, researchers, and copywriters are used to support a particular number of product folks and engineers. Not every business is the same, but it gives you a point of reference.

Resourcing best practices

Most successful product organizations invest in talent systematically as to avoid removing a bottleneck on one team only to create a new one somewhere else. Spotify and Target for instance hire and grow their product, engineering and ux teams in pods. This approach accounts for the interdependent roles that are needed to support cross-functional teams.

I still see new Product Managers being on-boarded without leadership considering the other resources that person will need to be successful. A consumer focused PM is going to need a design resource, whether dedicated or not, and then want to build the thing they have define and design.

The "Pod" concept accounts for that by systematically hiring a team of resources to work together, 1 product manager, 1 UX designer, and 3+/- engineers. This system doesn't account for the additional resources that are needed to support the successful design, build and launch of a product, like UX research, UX Copywriter, Business Intelligence and QA to name a few.

The Pod model allows a designer to be dedicated to a particular part of the business and become a subject matter expert by living in that world with their teammates and getting to know their users. If a particular project doesn't require 100% of an individual designers time there are always other teams that can use a little design help, or they can work on internal team initiatives like design system development, process improvement, or mentoring junior team members.

Final thoughts

All this talk about teams could make you think I'm out for world domination via design team growth, but according to the Invisions: The New Design Frontier study, the average size of the most sophisticated design teams (only 5% of teams surveyed) was 15 people. So just because a team isn't 50 people big doesn't mean it can't be top notch.

I have almost always been on smaller scrappy teams and we still kick ass and take names, but the size of the design team ultimately needs to fit the overall business and its goals.