How big should a corporate design team be?

“What are good benchmarks for setting up a corporate design team?" 

These are the questions I have been trying to answer in the last couple of weeks. Nothing academic, just a ‘guesstimate’. For that purpose, I contacted a bunch of colleagues who work in web companies in the Silicon Valley and tried to collect a basic amount of data that would allow me to abstract some learnings and hopefully also metrics.

The companies I chose to talk to have revenue well above $1B, employee numbers on the 4-digits range and above, and have successful on-demand products used by literally hundreds of thousands of people globally.

The reason I picked large web companies with a constant stream of revenue from their products is because 1) they have more established and efficient organizations (not dramatically growing like a start-up, neither shrinking like a decaying company) and 2) because by having products with such large amount of users in the market, is hard to argue their products are not well designed given the low cost required by consumers to switch to other on-demand applications and services.

Here are some of the lessons learned:

• Corporate design teams are chronically understaffed. Not all product teams have design resources assigned to them. Only the products that are more strategic or are top priority get assigned design resources (even when they get them assigned, they are not always dedicated to it full time). A common practice is to have 'design office hours' so product managers in need can get some advice from designers. Sometimes, designers end up helping out product managers in their spare time either because they are passionate about the product and want to see it launch or because they would like to have on their CV a line that talks about their involvement with a product that hit the market (an asset quite scarce sometimes among designers). Not surprisingly given the potential savings, companies encourage their product managers to apply design thinking as much as possible so they don't have to rely always on the design team for basic product design tasks and product development can be sped up.
• Wide design diversity within the team. People within these design departments have different skills and different tasks. No radical homogeneity. All bundled together under the same leveling label ‘design’. The most common disciplines by far are interaction designers, followed by visual designers, and the tiniest group, user researchers. Some of the companies also have a special group of design strategists who engage in new product development rather than “product maintenance” of an existing mature product, but that is still not really common among large companies.
• The corporate design team golden ratio is 1:100. As I was looking for a metric that would allow me to compare a company with each other, I realized that a good indicator could be the investment each company dedicates to design resources. Since I had no access to design departments budget, the assumption I made is that the size of the design team in comparison to the number of employees a company could be a good proxy to measure the corporate understanding of design value . Triangulating the data I got from my interviewees with some public data from finance.google.com I managed to calculate the ratio, and surprise surprise, most of the companies had a very similar number: 1 design team member for every ~100 employees.*

Do this learnings resonate with the the way your design department works within your organization? Does your company have a more sophisticated way to organize design departments? Does the designer vs. employee ratio apply to your company as well?
 

* Disclaimer: the subject sample is on the single digits but still, I thought this initial metric could be a good starting point for further and more accurate benchmarking

Photo credit: Guardian Eyewitness