Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously

by Jeff Gothelf

One obstacle here is the shortage of skilled staff. Technology workers are in short supply, and it’s often difficult to hire and retain enough people to get the work done. Compounding this problem is a legacy of understaffing designers in organizations. Designers, once considered a luxury in the software world, are now a necessity for most teams. But organizations are struggling to adjust their staffing levels. In older organizations we often see ratios of one designer to every one hundred technology staffers. As a result, these folks are spread thin, and they typically work in central service departments that function as internal agencies. We believe that a more effective ratio is one designer for every ten engineers and, for some organizations, even higher. Some teams can get away without designers, especially those working on back-end and middleware functionality, but any team with customer- or user-facing functionality should not forgo design.