Typical Design Team Structures and Alignment (2024)

In a recent survey,we asked 557 UX and design professionals questions about the state of their teams, including:

• Design-team size, relative to overall company size
• Team structure and alignment
• Where design reports within the organization
• The team’s ability to impact key metrics

This article summarizes their responses and presents themes across design team variables.

Research Method and Participants

Data was collected via a digital survey over the last quarter of 2019. Some highlights of participant characteristics include:

• Participants reported working for 356 unique companies. (Company identification was optional within the survey, and various locations or business units of the same enterprise were merged.)
• Responses came from 59 countries (with the majority of responses from practitioners in the US, Brazil, UK, Germany, and Canada).
• 80% of participants identified design or research as their primary function.

Design-Team Size vs. Company Size

There was a wide distribution of company sizes reported. About half of the respondents (48%) were from companies with 500 or more employees and about half (52%) were from companies with less than 500 employees.

In addition to company size, we asked respondents to estimate how many designers worked at their organization.We found that the number of designers was strongly correlated with the size of the company (r=0.47; p<0.000001), with the bigger the company, the more designers being employed. For every extra 283 employees, we saw an additional designer being part of the organization.

Given this result, it’s unsurprising that we did not find any significant correlation between the organization size and the ratio between the number of designers and a number of employees at that organization.

A handful of respondents did not know how many designers were working within their company. This lack of awareness is an indication of poor collaboration and communication within the design community inside the organization. As one person put it: “[I have] no idea. That’s one of the problems.”

Design-Team Structure and Alignment

Typically, design-team structures align to one of 3 common models:

• Centralized: Designers are part of the same core team and report to the same manager.
• Decentralized: Designers are embedded on different crossfunctional teams throughout the organization, aligning to specific features, products, or lines of business.
• Hybrid (or matrix): In a combination of the above structures, designers have oversight from both a centralized manager and a manager from a specific product or line of business.

When we asked practitioners to identify their team structure, we saw a fairly even distributions of team models, with roughly a third of practitioners working within each of the above models.

This even distribution is reasonable: Each team structure has its benefits and drawbacks, and teams are often in constant transition as other variables, such as company size or team size, change or as new dedicated roles and skills (such as user research) are acquired.

Plotting the average company size per type of team structure reveals that companies with hybrid structures tend to be bigger than companies with centralized structures. The difference in size between companies with centralized and hybrid structures is statistically significant (p<0.05), indicating that, as companies grow, they tend to move from a centralized to hybrid model. However, the difference in size between companies with decentralized models and each of the other two models was not statistically significant.

For teams that report being decentralized, most are aligned to products (43%) or internal departments or lines of business (27%).

Most of theresponses classified as “other” were situations where designers were aligned to more than one thing, such as both products and customer-journey phases.

Design-Team Reporting and Impact

Additionally, we asked people where design reports within their organization, and what key metrics their design team has had proven impact on. The majority of design teams report either to product (27%) or directly to C-suite (23%), as shown below.

Most responses classified as “other” weresituations where design-reporting structure is:

• Split betweena combination of listed areas (such as IT and marketing, or marketing and product)
• In fluctuationfrom one engagement to another
• Absent, undefined,or volatile:
  • It's all over the place.
  • It's completely splintered at the moment.
  • We're still figuring this out.

Finally, we asked respondents which key business metrics their teams were able to impact. Perhaps unsurprisingly, design teams are able to demonstrate highest impact in the areas of product usability and visual design. Design teams are less successful at either affecting or at demonstrating impact upon widely used business metrics such as customer acquisition, revenue, and brand equity.

Interestingly, where a team reports does not seem to greatly affect its ability to impact key metrics, though there does appear to be a slight dip in proven impact on revenue for teams reporting to engineering, and an increase in proven impact on revenue for those reporting to operations. A team’s ability to show impact on visual design and product usability is consistently high regardless of where it reports.

One takeaway from this data may be that leadership should be aware that assigning UX and design to certain lines of business over others may bias metrics used to track design quality.

Summary of Key Findings

Overall, some interesting themes emerged from the data:

• Design-team size: As the number of employees grows at a company, the number of designers increases, with one designer added for roughly 300 employees. The ratio between the number of designers and the company size seems to stay constant regardless of the company size.
• Team structure: Teams structures are equally distributed across the 3 common models: centralized, decentralized and hybrid. Hybrid structures correspond to larger organization sizes moreso than centralized structures.
• Reporting: The majority of teams report to product management. Where design reports seems to not greatly affect a team’s ability (or lack of ability) to impact key business metrics.
• Impact: Teams have the greatest impact (or the greatest ability to demonstrate impact) on visual design and product usability.