More people is not the same as more capability.
When I joined Pipedrive, the design team was stretched across too much work. The business was moving from a successful sales tool towards a broader product platform, and the organisation around design needed to grow with it.
During my time as Senior Director of Product UX & Design, from 2019 to 2022, the design organisation grew from 18 to 84 people across six locations. That is the visible number. The more interesting question is what had to change so that growth could support better work.
Hiring into the same structure would have multiplied the pressure. More people would bring more handoffs, more local interpretations of quality and more decisions waiting for someone senior to make the call. I needed to help build a practice that could carry the work without every decision returning to the centre.
Build leadership depth, not another bottleneck.
I made the case for investment, then worked on the structure around design: leadership depth, specialist capabilities, career progression and clearer responsibilities for managers, leads and individual contributors.
Those responsibilities mattered more than the reporting lines. Teams needed to understand which decisions they could make locally, which needed alignment and when design, product and research leaders should work through a problem together. Without that clarity, adding leadership can add another approval queue.
The aim was to give people enough context and authority to act, alongside a clear route to support when the decision was difficult.
Give quality a shared language.
A talented designer can produce excellent work. A growing organisation also needs a way to recognise, discuss and improve that work together. Principles, examples, critique and career expectations made quality something we could talk about rather than something a few people were expected to recognise instinctively.
I worked on the standards and working habits that connected teams: how we framed a product problem, brought customer evidence into the conversation, reviewed work and helped people develop. Critique needed to explain why a decision worked, where it broke down and what to explore next.
That is how judgement becomes useful beyond the person who first made the call. The objective is not identical output. It is a consistent level of care, with room for teams to respond to different customer and product needs.
Make the practice work across locations.
Across six locations, useful context cannot depend on being in the right room. Shared artefacts, critique habits and design operations helped connect customer understanding, product priorities and the decisions teams were making.
Workshops and cross-functional working were useful when they helped resolve a product question or gave people a shared direction to develop. Their value was in what happened afterwards: clearer ownership, a stronger design conversation and a team that could move the work forward.
The structure also had to support the product redesign itself. Organisation design and interface design met in the everyday work: who could make a decision, what evidence they had and how they knew whether the result was good enough.
What I take from the experience.
The organisation grew, but headcount is not a measure of design quality. The lesson I take from Pipedrive is that growth needs supporting conditions: leadership depth, specialist capability, shared standards and habits that keep teams connected.
I do not see those as a replacement for hands-on design. They create the conditions for it. A clear operating model should give designers more room to understand the problem, explore alternatives and resolve the detail, with fewer avoidable returns caused by missing context or unclear ownership.
Faster tools make this more relevant.
AI can accelerate exploration and production. It does not remove the need to decide what is worth making, question a plausible answer or recognise when an interface is confusing. If the organisation cannot discuss quality, faster production can simply create more work to review.
The same questions still matter. Who owns this decision? What evidence supports it? Which standards should apply? What needs a second pair of eyes, and what can the team confidently take forward?
For me, scaling design means giving more people the context and capability to do good work. Grow the team. Keep the quality. The second part needs as much deliberate design as the first.