Designers to developers

Designers and developers need each other. Without designers, developers don’t know what to build, and without developers, designers can’t see their creation become reality.

But what is the ideal ratio of designers to developers? Of course this can vary widely depending on the kind of product and tech, but in my experience, what a designer creates in one day can take a developer a week to build. So very roughly speaking, about 1 to 5.

It is not uncommon for companies to have dozens or even hundreds of developers but only a handful of designers – or none at all. Whatever the industry, designers will always be a minority, just like there will always be more contractors and builders than architects.

It’s easy to think that you mostly need developers. They are the ones actually creating value. It’s the code that gets shipped, not the whiteboard with stickies or the Figma file. And in a world where everything has to be digitalized, the backlog of things to build is ever increasing. Those backlogs and roadmaps require developers, developers, developers.

Yet, let’s not forget the value of designers in digital transformation. Not just because great experiences cannot be created by only developers. Design is a job for designers. But here’s something teams often forget: a good designer can create the same amount of value with less code that needs to be written. Good design follows the Agile principle of maximizing the amount of work not done.

This is what designers are good at. Challenging developers and product owners to make things more simple, not more complex. Creating elegant, simple solutions that are not just better for the user, but are also easier to build, less complex and need less maintenance. Designers are also great at helping to prioritize, for example by using user research to validate or invalidate certain choices. Too often teams ship features that shouldn’t have been built in the first place. That’s where a lot of the so much needed development resources go.

So next time you have a job opening for a developer, ask yourself: should I hire a designer instead?