Dear (none)Designer,

Welcome back to the twenty-sixth Design at Scale™ Newsletter – focusing on innovation and how design drives change in a large organisation or an agency.

The pandemic has had a profound impact on all businesses, resulting in massive layoffs and affecting design functions. As a tipping point of the last thirty years, we have witnessed the decline of design power within organisations. Instead of gaining influence by delivering more and faster, the design has become fractionalised (or productised) into smaller, specific functions and occupations. Specialisations have reduced the impact of design as a trade and increased the complexity of relationships by breaking down the capabilities of the single designer into multiple functions. More designers need to communicate effectively to translate their impact – and let's face it, designers are not typically strong communicators. So, where it needs to be clear, thought through, and rationalised, product managers usually step in.

The pandemic has created an environment that allows designers to so-called productise themselves instead of leveraging the power of their knowledge to deliver high-quality services at a high price – every designer becomes a hired gun for $200 bucks on fever.com

The positive side is that everybody can do it. Anyone with a spare bedroom, pyjamas, a trending laptop (hopefully with a lot of stickers), and a Figma account for 15 quid can open a Fiveer account and become a designer in the Team of One. This way, the redistributive design function has reached its saturation point, allowing all businesses, including startups, to hire relatively high-quality designers at a very low price point.

This positive transition creates two challenges in the market: focusing on cost rather than quality and longevity, and secondly, it increases the overall design cost for the business.

Let me demonstrate this with a small example. Startup of 5 with an investment of £1m (or equivalent business unit in a large organisation), hire a designer on Fiveer for £60-100k. A less experienced designer will be a perfect fit, as the CEO and CPO can exert their influence over design making and creation, allowing them to obtain everything they need within a short period of time. This solves an immediate problem – design is out. However, this equally creates a whole new set of problems. The design can not be easily modified as it is not set up for scale and further iteration – it is just delivered. Often, this creates an additional challenge of hiring more designers rather than hiring an experienced design professional. Someone who can create the product design architecture, align marketing with the point of sale, and advise on A/B testing, exposing the product features.

In a growing business, cost-driven decision-making jeopardises the quality of work and increases the chances of refactoring design and development, which ultimately costs the organisation 3-9 times more than the original estimates*.

A design team of one is ultimately the best solution for Startups and Scaleups – if the designer is the right type of designer. Well-rounded professionals of all kinds can now be added to and removed from teams with high-quality outputs for your product or service. Ultimately, it enables the organisation to: create a product structure, where product owners understand and have defined what they want to be designed. And second, hiring designers with specific skills and ensuring a seamless handover between them, so that continuity and a robust knowledge base are built alongside the project itself. The question that every CEO faces is, if one contractor leaves, how quickly the other contractor can pick up the slack. With documented design decisions in less than 2-3 days.

It has been well-documented that the impact of an incorrect handover costs 3 to 5 times more than initially anticipated (if 3-5 is in weeks, you've got your number). Project management professionals often don't calculate the knowledge transfer and never anticipate the impact on the final product when the knowledge is lost.

What has become detrimental to all design professionals over the years is the force of becoming part of a company in order to translate their knowledge (commoditise their knowledge). Sadly, this significant threat of gaining someone's knowledge over the last five years has tripled the formidable force, turning missionaries (visionaries) into mercenaries (acquisitive).

Zero barrier to knowledge crossing the business, design and development allows designers to start an outfit, build the site, and gain a substantial amount of knowledge on how things are done. The majority of designers in a team of one embrace the power of vibe coding and have a deeper knowledge of available plug-ins and automation out there in comparison to a full-time employee.

As a paradox, the people who have the most time explore less and the people who have less time explore more to save the time to be able to deliver what is at stake. Bringing these unicorns into the agency or business creates unexpected tension as they fear being tamed.

If you are therefore choosing a career as a designer, your decision whether you get employed or create your outfit sets you immediately apart from the rest – try our Design Evaluation Matrix. The simple mental step will eventually create a completely different personality, and the perception of how to resolve all design and non-design problems will be vastly different and have several advantages for your full-time colleagues. Designed a team of one, usually works with 2 to 5 clients, depending on the design, to give us an idea of how these skills can be automated in order to deliver a desirable proposition.

For more information, please visit Designa at Scale™ – GRID Magazine, where you can find additional relevant articles that explore high-performing teams, self-organising teams of 001, teams of 010, and teams of 100 that deliver the value proposition within a product-led environment.