Dear (none)Designer,

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

Every designer in the world has been part of a siloed design team at least once. Whether you work in Southeast Asia, Europe, South America or Australia, you always end up in a siloed team.

Regardless, if you are a freelancer or full-timer working from your bedroom, you would understand the silo team immediately. Despite all digital connections, a digital board, frequent updates, project management advantages, and monitoring teams, the silo team is the person sitting in pyjamas in the bedroom, staring at the wall.

I almost hear my colleague saying Good old days, integrated teams where designers and developers actually sit together. We cultivate a mutual relationship, understanding each other's strengths and weaknesses, and actually have the ability to go for lunch and chat about life beyond work.

These days, with all the remote advantages, we build a factory of loners who pretend to believe that we're part of something bigger, yet become disposable functions that can be dismissed by cancelling the call.
To clarify, the above representation of the remote team is not intended to undermine the remote culture. There has always been and will always be a need for remote specialists. There are extensive analytics that clearly indicate that remote teams are not as productive as integrated teams, and that the remote culture, especially in a creative discipline, is not something businesses would want to adopt for longer than necessary.
We are not suggesting that designers cannot work remotely; even some remote designers might be an outstanding asset to any team.

What we are debating here is whether basing your design team in a completely remote environment, let alone in different time zones and cultures, will eventually cause unpredictable tensions that need to be addressed.

If your business is relying on a hired gun for $200 bucks from Southeast Asia or South Africa, that's absolutely fine. Statistically, your development time will increase by 42% and that is not due to the inefficiency of the designer; it's simply a communication overhead.
In a remote team, the majority of designers purely deliver screens but do not solve the architecture, visual language, and design integration.

We often see that in startups, a newly appointed CEO is looking for a cheap designer source and hiring someone for the above-mentioned $2000 bucks to design 200 screens based on a verbal call or an AI-generated brief. Inevitably, a solo designer or silo-design team will approach it most pragmatically and create visuals that represent the brief, but are unlikely to represent the problem that needs to be solved.

In conclusion, remote design teams can be effectively integrated with internal teams to provide an extra boost, also known as a catalyst for the project. This way, you can harness the power of cheap design resources and deliver something in a short period of time.

However, using the silo design approach, where teams or individuals are the primary resource for product development, will likely result in a 30 to 40% increase in development time overhead. This means that, although you will save $10,000 to $15,000 on design resources, you will overspend on development by $200,000 USD.

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.