Managers, leads and specialists carried different kinds of judgement across product areas.
Scaling design without scaling chaos.
At Pipedrive, the design organisation grew from 18 to 84 people across six locations. The hard part was not simply hiring designers. It was building one that could improve how product teams made decisions as the company became larger, faster and more distributed.
Scale tests the operating model.
Pipedrive was moving from a successful single-product SaaS company into a broader product organisation. The design organisation had to mature quickly enough to support that shift. More designers alone would not solve the problem. At scale, quality can become uneven, critique can become inconsistent, leadership layers can blur ownership, and teams can solve similar product problems in different ways.
The work was about building operational resilience into design: enough structure for quality to travel, enough clarity for leaders to make decisions, and enough flexibility for teams to keep moving without waiting for permission from the centre.
The job was to make judgement travel.
The goal was not process for its own sake. It was a design organisation that could keep making good decisions as the business grew.
That meant moving from talent-led quality to system-supported quality. Career levels, leadership rituals, critique habits, product framing, research practices and design standards all had to help teams make better decisions without depending on one or two senior people to hold the whole system together.
The commercial value sits in that shift. When design judgement becomes easier to share, product teams can make better local decisions, leaders can spot quality risks earlier, and the organisation spends less energy recovering from inconsistency, rework and unclear ownership.
What had to change
01
Create leadership depth
Move from dependency on a few senior individuals to a leadership model where managers, leads and specialists carried different kinds of judgement across product areas.
02
Make quality visible
Turn taste into standards, examples, critique habits and review loops that made good work easier to recognise and weaker work easier to challenge.
03
Clarify ownership
Help teams understand which decisions belonged locally, which decisions needed alignment, and where product, design and research leadership needed to act together.
04
Frame product problems better
Use shared artefacts to connect customer evidence, business priorities and product strategy before teams committed to solutions.
05
Scale rituals with intent
Use workshops, design operations and team structures to improve cross-functional work across product areas and locations, rather than treating process as theatre.
What changed
The organisation grew from 18 to 84 people across six locations, with Stephen carrying significant design budget responsibility. More importantly, design became easier for the business to understand and harder for the organisation to treat as decoration.
The work moved design leadership from reactive support into a stronger product capability: clearer quality conversations, more resilient teams, better cross-functional participation and a stronger foundation for product transformation.
The resilient design organisation
18
84
Scaling without becoming fragile meant designing the conditions around the work.
The important shift was from quality held by a few senior people to quality supported by leadership depth, shared standards, decision habits and cross-functional trust.
Principles, examples and critique made good work easier to recognise and weaker work easier to challenge.
Teams understood which decisions belonged locally, which needed alignment and where leadership needed to step in.
Design became a stronger partner in customer, product and commercial conversations, not a downstream production function.
Outcome
A distributed design organisation that could absorb growth, support product teams and keep judgement moving without everything returning to the centre.
Why this matters now
AI makes this leadership pattern more relevant, not less. If production becomes faster but judgement remains weak, teams can create more output without creating more value. The organisation still needs shared standards, strong critique, clear ownership and evidence that can travel.
The Pipedrive story is therefore not nostalgia for older workshop practice. It is evidence of a larger leadership pattern: scaling design by scaling judgement.
Operational resilience
Build design teams that can absorb growth, change and new tools without losing coherence.
Judgement at scale
Make standards and critique strong enough that faster production improves the work instead of diluting it.
Commercial value
Connect design quality to product outcomes, adoption, confidence and organisational learning.