whitneymcn:

Seems like Douglas Bowman’s observation on leaving Google is relevant here: the number of designers on staff signifies less than whether any of those designers hold a position of authority in the company.

If “design” doesn’t have any muscle within the organization—it’s viewed as those people who are eventually brought in to make stuff look pretty—sheer numbers are irrelevant. Until the revolution comes, of course.

caterpillarcowboy:

davidkaneda:

Luke Wroblewski’s notes from a recent presentation from Facebook on their design philosophy and approach. The most astonishing part of reading this was learning that Facebook’s design team consists of only 25 people. That’s 25 out of 1,000 total employees, designing an app which a quarter billion people use every day.

How would having more designers help? How is it related to the number of users? This reminds me of the Mythical Man-Month.

whitneymcn+1

Also, good engineers overlap a lot with product designers. Same with good startup founders. I’ve been really impressed with the quality of good design thinking by people who don’t have ‘design’ in their title.

Ohh, and pretty much any way you slice anything done at facebook, you’ll end up with a number where someone will say “Only X people do that thing that affects Y trillion users?!”

It’s pretty awesome, related to a comment here.