I do not scale teams. I fix coverage.

Every company I have joined, I have grown the team. Three to twelve at The Times. Sixty to 139 across the profession at EE. Two to twelve at Cazoo. Said like that, it sounds like the thing I do is add designers.

It is not, and the distinction matters, because scaling for its own sake is how design teams get cut two years later.

I scale when design cannot be present where decisions are made. That is the whole test. At three designers covering an app and a website, nobody is in discovery, nobody is doing research, and nobody is thinking past the next ticket, because there is physically no one to do it. The team is not underperforming. It is under-covered. Those look identical from a distance and they have opposite fixes.

So the question I actually ask is never how many designers should we have. It is: where are decisions being made without design in the room, and what is that costing? Sometimes the answer is a hire. Sometimes it is moving a designer from a quiet product to a loud one. Once, at EE, the answer was that the layer above the designers was the gap, and we created the Principal role rather than adding headcount underneath a structure that could not hold it.

The number is the last step, and it is the least interesting one. Headcount on its own would have bought me twelve people doing tickets instead of three. What I am actually buying is coverage: a designer in the room when the decision happens, instead of a designer redrawing the decision afterwards.

If you cannot say what a new hire makes possible that is currently impossible, you are not scaling. You are just hiring.