Scaling Design Teams for Impact
How to structure, mentor, and empower designers to operate ahead of product needs
3 lessons from leading design at Grubhub
The best design teams don’t just react to product changes. They operate ahead of product needs, influencing strategy, and driving business outcomes. But how do you build a team that does more than execute? How do you create a design function that’s truly embedded in product and business success?
Over the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to scale design teams across Corporate, Merchant, and B2B Marketplace at Grubhub. Here’s what I’ve learned about structuring, mentoring, and growing high-impact design teams.
1️⃣ Build for Strategic Influence, Not Just Execution
One of the biggest challenges in B2B product design is that teams are often reactive rather than proactive. This happens when:
Designers are brought in late in the process rather than shaping early product discussions.
The team lacks a clear design voice in roadmap planning.
Stakeholders see design as a delivery function rather than a strategic partner.
📌 How to fix this:
Embed design earlier by aligning roadmaps with PMs and Eng leads each quarter.
Encourage more senior members (Staff Designers & Principals) to lead discovery work rather than waiting for product briefs.
Frame design in business terms - show how UX decisions impact user engagement, retention, and drive revenue.
2️⃣ Mentor and Grow Senior Designers as Strategic Leaders
Design teams scale not just through headcount, but through the depth of their senior talent. At Grubhub, I focused on activating our Staff Designers to lead in B2B leadership meetings, cross-functional planning, and stakeholder influence.
📌 Key growth strategies:
Create clear paths to promotion (ex: defining Staff-level expectations).
Encourage ownership of key initiatives - let senior designers drive high-impact projects that influence company direction.
Promote a culture of proactive problem-solving - senior designers should be asking “What should we build next?” not just refining existing work.
3️⃣ Operationalizing Design for Scalability
As teams grow, scaling design operations becomes essential. Pushing our older B2B products and team to adopt a Figma-based design system, implementing structured design critiques, and formalizing business review processes were some of the key steps I took to increase design velocity without sacrificing our quality.
📌 Key frameworks that scale:
Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) - Integrating Voice of Customer (VoC) insights directly into reviews and product roadmap prioritization.
Component-based Design Systems - Reduced our design iteration cycles and improved cross-platform consistency and engineering handoff.
Mentorship & Growth - Led to 3 internal promotions, improving talent our talent retention.
💡 Final Thoughts
Scaling a design team isn’t just about headcount or efficiency - it’s about elevating design’s role as a strategic driver. If teams are structured well, they don’t just follow the roadmap… they help define it!
What challenges have you faced in scaling your design team? Let’s chat!
