What design actually costs at each stage — and what you get for it
Understanding what to spend on design and when is a tough call. Under-invest too early, and you might never reach minimum viability. Over-invest and you’ve got more design than your engineers can keep up with, which is money wasted.
In leading design teams from one to many, here’s what I’ve learned.
Conception
The work that happens before the thing exists as a real entity.
0 designers, 0FTE
You’re spending your own time and money to understand your users and stakeholders. A cofounding engineer might be helping you with some design as they built out a proof of concept. Fast and loose is OK here, but be mindful of how much time is being pulled from your ability to work on the organization (and not in it), and how much your engineer is spending on design. They didn’t necessarily sign up for design work, so it could be messing with their flow.
1 designer, 1 FTE
The job of organizing research, generating insights, drafting options for how your product could work, testing those options, and implementing them have become large enough to bring on a contractor, maybe a full-time hire if your product or service is design-intensive (lifestyle-oriented, or perhaps driven by complex data modeling and visualization).
Look for a senior designer, ideally someone with design leadership experience. You don’t want a junior designer who is more interested in learning or making a name for themselves. That will pull their work into a direction that suits their trajectory, not yours.
2 designers, 1.5–2 FTEs
This is where you can bring on someone junior. A senior design leader who can liaise with you and engineering to distill organizational and user needs into actionable insights and a protege to carry out the production and repetitive work.
The junior designer will working alongside someone señor, who they can be mentored by. The senior designer’s expertise will be focused where it’s needed most: complex problem-solving and aesthetic authorship.
Formation
The thing becomes real.
4 designers, 3–4 FTEs
As you find product-market fit, your organization will begin to scale rapidly. Ask your senior designer if they’d like to continue on scaling or find a replacement. I know many design leaders who love to build the initial product, then hand the long-term management of the team over to someone for long-term growth and maintenance.
If you’re rolling out new verticals, move this kind of designer to that work and find a senior contributor to manage the steadier workflows. If the junior designer from the conception phase is interested in leadership, this is a great chance for them to cut their teeth.
The other roles will be:
A user researcher, a mid-level person to scope, schedule, run and distill user interviews and analytics data
A junior designer to replace the previous one, who at this point should have been promoted
10 designers, 6–10 FTEs
To accelerate long-term scalability, a small design team with internal structures (formal leveling and pay bands) and processes (structured partnership to key workflows, design reviews) is required. At this point, you’re no longer attracting the “move fast and break things” designers, you need folks who can hang out for the long-haul organizational processes (think meetings). This is a different mindset, and I’ve seen organizations like HubSpot struggle.
If your first hire is still here, they become Director of Design, reporting to a Director of Product or, ideally, directly to senior leadership. At this point, design must keep lock-step with the highest-order organizational strategy and decision-making. Design resources should at all times be allocated to the most important work, and the ad hoc stuff (a fancy deck for a conference) can be out-sourced to contractors.
Establishment
The org becomes a system that can outlast its founders.
10+ designers, 10+ FTEs
At this stage, you have a stable design organization with a Director of Design or Chief Design Officer (CDO) reporting directly to the CEO and managing a few heads:
Head of User Research will have a handful of researchers partnered to high-level structures. If you have a few products, you might have one per product.
Head of Product Design has more folks under them, as many as are needed to consistently ship the code as needed to support growth. If you have 20 engineers, you need 5 product designers.
Head of Communications Design manages brand development and systems, sales and marketing materials, and can manage a small group of contractors for thugs big fancy decks that pop up.
All of these folks report to your CDO so that they’re work stays aligned to organization developments and stays coordinated. Remember, your users, customers, and stakeholders don’t want to see their lifecycle stage reflected back to them with disjointed experiences. They see their interaction with you as a single thing, with consistent promises, messages, and value delivered always.
