Building Scalable Design Teams

Lessons from Growing a Platform Org 3X

The journey of scaling a design team differs fundamentally from scaling other organizational functions. While engineering teams can often subdivide problems and add capacity linearly, design teams face the unique challenge of maintaining a cohesive vision and consistent user experience as they grow. The complexity increases exponentially, not linearly.

Over the past three years, I've navigated this challenge firsthand, growing our platform design organization from 10 to 30 designers. This growth came in response to our company's rapid expansion and increasing product complexity – but simply adding headcount proved to be the easiest part of the equation.

The real test was to develop the structural frameworks and cultural foundations that would enable this larger team to operate effectively without sacrificing quality or speed. The lessons learned (and we continue to learn every day) weren't just about hiring practices, but about creating systems that scale alongside your people – systems that empower rather than constrain, that provide guidance without dictating, and that evolve as your organization matures.

The Foundation: Hybrid Structure for Scale

Early in our scaling journey, I recognized that neither a purely centralized nor fully embedded design model would serve our needs. Centralized teams often become disconnected from day-to-day product development, while fully embedded designers can lose sight of cross-product consistency and shared vision.

Our solution was a hybrid model that has proven remarkably effective for platform organizations: designers embedded within cross-functional product teams, complemented by a layer of design leadership that spans across these teams. Each designer collaborates closely with a product manager to solve daily challenges, though the relationship is consultative rather than hierarchical. The designer brings expertise to help frame problems and explore solutions, while the PM ultimately owns product decisions. In parallel, designers are guided by a design lead who may not be their formal manager but serves as the design authority for that product area, ensuring quality standards, supporting professional growth, and maintaining coherence across the broader platform experience.

This structure offers several key advantages for scaling platform teams:

First, it maintains close alignment between designers and their product counterparts, ensuring design has a voice early in product development. Second, it creates natural communities of practice through the design leads, preserving consistent standards and shared learning across the organization. Third, it provides clear career paths for designers who want to progress either deeper into craft or toward leadership.

I've frequently heard concerns that this hybrid approach risks diluting design quality or creating confused reporting lines. Our experience has been the opposite. By clearly defining responsibilities between product and design leadership, we've actually strengthened accountability while giving designers the right support at the right time. The key has been establishing explicit agreements about decision rights and regular coordination between leadership teams.

Cultural Scaling: Beyond Headcount

When your design team triples in size, simply maintaining your existing culture becomes impossible – and arguably undesirable. What works for a team of 10 rarely works for a team of 30. The challenge isn't preserving your culture, but evolving it intentionally.

At one point, I realized that 70% of our designers had been with the company for less than a year. We couldn't rely on osmosis or informal mentorship to transmit our values and approaches. This led to the development of a structured onboarding program specifically for designers – a program that's continuously evolving. We're still very much on a journey to perfect this onboarding experience, relying heavily on constant feedback from designers who join our team. Their fresh perspectives help us identify blind spots and refine our approach with each new cohort. Rather than focusing solely on tools and processes, we built immersive experiences around our core principles: user advocacy, business understanding, and collaborative problem-solving.

We're planning to enhance our onboarding beyond simple shadowing with carefully designed activities that will demonstrate these principles in action. Our roadmap includes having every new designer conduct user interviews within their first month, collaborate on business value assessments with their product counterparts, and participate in cross-team design critiques. These structured experiences, once fully implemented, will give newcomers practical exposure to our values rather than just theoretical understanding.

We are also developing, with help from our DesignOps team, scalable rituals that work regardless of team size. Our design reviews shifted from full-team critique sessions (unmanageable with larger teams) to a rotating schedule where projects receive focused attention from a diverse but smaller group. This maintains quality while respecting everyone's time.

Perhaps most importantly, we are establishing clear quality principles and empowering design leads to uphold them, with my role shifting toward strategic guidance and coaching these leads. This distributes quality control across the organization, creating a scalable system rather than a bottleneck.

Scaling my layer of design leadership has been absolutely critical to our success. I rely heavily on these leaders not just for maintaining quality, but for extending our design influence throughout the organization. By investing in their growth – through executive shadowing, stakeholder management training, and business acumen development – we've multiplied our impact far beyond what one person could achieve alone. These design leaders have become trusted advisors to their product counterparts, elevating design conversations from visual execution to strategic direction. Their ability to translate business objectives into design opportunities has transformed how our company perceives design's value. Without this leadership layer, we simply couldn't scale our impact, regardless of how many individual contributors we added.

Process Evolution: The Modified Double Diamond

As our organization has grown, we've recognized the need to evolve our design processes. While we started with traditional methodologies, our focus now is on integrating design earlier in the product development lifecycle where we can have the greatest impact.

We're actively introducing design in areas where we previously had limited presence, particularly at the beginning of solution definition. This upstream involvement allows designers to help shape requirements rather than simply executing against predetermined specifications.

A critical shift in our approach has been elevating our Design Leads to become essential members of the leadership team for every product in our Platform ecosystem. These leaders ensure design considerations are incorporated from day one, representing both user needs and coherent experiences across the platform.

This strategic positioning of design has allowed us to transition from reactive execution to proactive influence, fundamentally changing how design contributes to our products and business outcomes.

Aligning with Business Objectives

A design organization that scales successfully must demonstrate clear business impact. As we grew, I started to introduce individual goals for every designer aligned with broader company objectives, ensuring each team member understood how their work connected to organizational priorities and could articulate that value to stakeholders. We're now preparing for a second iteration of this alignment process with our Design Leads involved from the beginning. This deeper integration of leadership will sharpen our focus on business impact, giving every member of our design organization greater clarity on their contributions and enabling them to more effectively shape the solutions we create.

I'm currently exploring several measurement frameworks to strengthen our business alignment, including a modified version of the Google HEART framework (Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, Task success). I plan to discuss with my design leadership team how we might map each design initiative to specific business metrics, creating a shared language between design, product, and executive leadership. This would elevate our discussions from subjective preferences to objective outcomes.

We're also considering implementing quarterly reviews where teams would present not just their design work but its measurable impact on business results. These ideas, along with suggestions from my leadership team, will help shape how we continue to evolve our organization's approach to demonstrating business value.

One important aspect of our approach is how we frame our work as business wins rather than just design improvements. This strategic positioning has already helped us secure executive support for additional user research resources and continues to shift perceptions of design from a service function to a strategic driver of business value.

Conclusion

Scaling a design team successfully requires equal attention to structure, culture, process, and business alignment. The hybrid organizational model we've developed offers a powerful framework for growing platform design teams, balancing the need for embedded product knowledge with consistent user experiences across the platform.

The most valuable lesson I've learned is to design your organization for where you're going, not where you've been. Too often, I've seen design leaders create structures around their current team's strengths rather than future needs. This approach inevitably breaks as you scale, forcing painful reorganizations later.

Instead, I've come to believe in designing the organization you'll need two years from now, then growing your people into it. This forward-looking approach has allowed us to scale without the typical growing pains many organizations experience.

As design continues to mature as a strategic function, our leadership approaches must evolve accordingly. The future belongs to integrated design organizations that balance creative excellence with business acumen, technical feasibility with user advocacy, and immediate needs with long-term vision.

The true measure of design leadership at scale isn't the size of your team, but its impact on your business and users. By focusing on that impact rather than headcount, we create design organizations that don't just grow bigger – they grow better.