At Obvious, we are about to have nine engineers to four designers, which is a lower design/eng ratio than we've had in the past (but much less than, say, early days of Twitter -- when we had basically no real designers).

As your product/service grows, I think it's natural to have a lot more people work on the back-end/infrastructure pieces, as the total work for that part outstrips the part that users see. So I expect this to change over time.

Also, different types of products call for different ratios of work (though, in general, more design resources are needed than used to be the case in pretty much every category).

What's your experience/ratio?

Branch is two designers and three engineers. It has worked very well, so far.

Cap, curious to hear about the ratios at Formspring, Amazon, and Etsy!

From my experience both at companies I've worked at and companies I work with now, I have seen the healthiest ratios around 3-4 feature/product engineers to one designer. Design is so integral to any feature that you want to have a designer with enough time to create and iterate ahead of development and also iterate during the build process. Anything more than 4:1 gets you to a place where a designer is barely able to iterate on just what the team is doing right now and not prepare ahead of time. If you can have more designers, some may feel stuck and not own enough that is getting built. I defined this as "feature/product engineers" though vs ones that work on non-user facing systems which I don't really count in the ratio.

My experience has been pretty varied, but I'd say that the number of designers you need is different depending on when you hire them.

For instance, at Formspring, I was the fifth hire. There hadn't been any design done before that, and I essentially got to start from scratch. Awesome. The truth is, I can design much faster than an engineer or two can build, so I quickly built up a buffer that, even when I left, they hadn't overcome. That was with me doing most of the design, HTML and CSS (with a junior designer coming on around a year in). The early start coupled with a pretty solid product backlog (and a dedication to keeping me abreast of what was coming) allowed us to operate at a lower ratio than most (20-2 or so when I left).

(cont).

At Amazon, there had been a designer on the project early. But honestly it was an entirely different ballgame. We were quickly outnumbered (hundreds of engineers to a dozen designers) and behind the ball for quite some time. Amazon's at an interesting intersection where they're really fighting to make design a priority, but there's friction against the existing system. There are growing pains there, but I think they've got the right people in the right positions to make design a high (if not highest) priority.

At Etsy, there's a surprisingly similar ratio, though it's well understood that isn't sustainable. The hardest part is finding the right people at this point. Shameless plug: send me your kick-ass designers! :)

(one more).

To be honest, I haven't dug enough at Etsy to understand how that happened, but my first impression is that it was unintended.

One other anecdote: at Zoosk I was literally the only designer from five employees to nearly one hundred. I was easily juggling mobile, web and some marketing assets. Really a byproduct of my process not slowing down while the eng. org.'s did (thanks to scale).

I think having the right people early enough can let your company have a strong design presence for a good long while. The real issue isn't the work, but rather leadership responsibilities that may interfere with your designer(s) getting things done. Hire when your current team is a little stretched. Hire when it starts to hurt, but not before.

Interested to hear how people break down the roles of different types of designers as projects progress.

One of the things that really surprised me when I moved from being an architect (as in construction industry) to the tech world was that design was still about look and feel rather than architecture.

We're at 2 feature engineers to 1 designer and I think it's working pretty well. What is the norm for frontend versus backend engineer? We're edging closer to 1-to-1 which is where I think we need to be, but curious of other perspectives.

As an aside, does everyone think about building product teams in terms of ratios? It's how I think about it, but I've never actually talked to others about it.

David: In the early stages (and even the slightly-later stages), having "types of designers" is inefficient. Start with a generalist (someone who can own UX, wireframes, visual design and, ideally, the presentation layer). When they're strapped for time, hire another generalist. Keep hiring generalists until you can't find any or until you really need someone with a specific skill set.

Noah: I've never been somewhere that strove to keep a ratio going. I get the reasoning, but really every person on your team will scale differently so it seems kind of crazy to institute a ratio. Are you not going to hire that amazing engineer because you're having a difficult time making a solid design hire?

@Cap: No, of course not, I agree they can't be something that you're religious about. But it seems like a good rule of thumb. If I run into 10 great engineers tomorrow I'll hire them all, but that's not realistic so it's more about how do you prioritize your next hire.

Noah: Use the pain scale. Where does it hurt the most? :)