Why Large Orgs Struggle with Design

Large companies are well staffed with designers. They have generous budgets to hire the best talent and give them the best tools to do their work. And yet the products that come out of these companies often remain stagnant, feel uninspired, and appear to actively deteriorate over time. The disparity between their resources and the output is striking.

Having worked with and within several major tech organizations, I’ve observed recurring patterns that explain why this happens. These issues aren’t about lack of talent or resources, but rather systemic and cultural failures that prevent excellence from emerging despite the best intentions of the individuals.

Let’s explore some important themes around the systemic issues at large companies.

Issues with org structure

• Large teams tend to get political. A lot of time is spent on discussing the boundaries of ownership between product areas and not enough time is spent on discussing issues in the product. This in and of itself is not a problem, but these debates take a lot of important time away from builders who should be focused on improving the product. Designers inevitably get pulled into these conversations as stakeholders, and they often end up witnessing user experience get fragmented away at the helm of these debates.

• Designing the ideal org chart gets a lot more focus than designing a solid product. Org design is important and is a precursor to setting up teams for success. However, the problem occurs when org design becomes either a long running exercise or the goal itself. Both are bad. Instabilities in org structure leads to designers having to keep shifting their focus between different product areas, and they end up not building a strong depth of understanding in any of them.

• Design leadership creates impractical and disconnected design principles. We’ve all seen leadership go on lengthy retreats to reimagine the way the org ‘designs’ its products. The most common outcome of such retreats is a set of new design principles. More often than not, these principles lack the current context of the org. They fail to address the immediate needs of the product and designers working on them. They lack the required guidance on how to implement them. This leads to incoherent and inconsistent application of the principles during product reviews, leading to further confusion.

• Most design principles aren’t specific or practical enough for daily use. Good design principles guide designers when they get stuck during the build phase. Good principles offer clarity and a way forward. Instead, you see designers giving up on using the principles and they get relegated to the onboarding and immersion decks, with little practical value in day to day design work.

• Large companies love doing vision work. Showing an ideal future state in absence of all the pesky constraints of today. This is great, in fact quite useful. But the hard part is setting the team up for success with a clear strategy for how to get to the vision state. That strategy is usually absent. Vision work sits pretty in decks.

Decision-making problems

• Designers closest to user problems can’t implement desirable solutions because central platform teams won’t let them. This is a classic issue in large companies. There are feature teams and then there’s a central platform team. This setup is quite useful and has its benefits. But the challenge comes when the ‘contract’ between the teams isn’t clear or well defined. Feature teams should be empowered to solve user problems and push updates to the platform team. Platform teams should offer guidance on how to structure and push the updates. In absence of the contract, this relationship gets fractured, leading to frequent escalations and rough meetings.

• Design systems intended to help creators end up restricting them instead. Design systems need to continue evolving as user needs evolve and products grow. But the DS never updates at the same pace as it needs to. A similar problem of two teams running with different priorities occurs as we saw above with the platform team.

• Designers like to ‘go rogue’ and fix things, but large companies don’t make that easy either. Large companies have a very structured approval motion that doesn’t really allow for a culture of quick fixes. You could do that easily in a startup – fix that pesky CSS bug, push an update and done. The large company would require you to find the right bug board, file the bug with sufficient details, wait for it to be assigned to someone, hope the SLA fits in their timeline and wait for the fix. Or request access to the codebase itself – an approval matrix of its own.

• Launch timelines mostly factor in the ‘bare minimum’ quality, not accounting for time required for the final fit and finish. Timelines are set aggressively. And when the time comes to cut scope, that final 10% fit and finish, or the visual polish is usually what gets cut out of the scope to get things out in time. Systemic problem.

Cultural challenges

• Large company culture rewards not offending anyone over having a direct conversation about quality of work. Feedback on someone’s work is a sensitive topic. Even in intense review sessions, you’d notice the tone and sharpness of the feedback is contained within the acceptable level of word-salad that often gets lost or misinterpreted by the designer. This means the designer would have to revise things multiple times till the feedback actually lands. Super inefficient.

• Intentional design requires a strong point of view, but large companies often avoid taking a bold stand. There’s too many interests to protect amongst the stakeholders, and it’s not an easy environment to take firm and clear stands about certain product decisions. This means a designer often wouldn’t get a clear directive on what approach to pick. Especially not in the larger design review forums.

• Companies vouch for innovation while inadvertently making it hard to practice. You’d see a lot of discourse in large companies about how they’re all for innovating and embracing change. Sounds great to hear. But when new approaches are presented and socialized, you see what the real appetite for change is in the organization.

Disconnection from users and reality

• People in large companies are very isolated from the outside world. Working in a large company is an echo chamber. There’s a ton going on inside and just to keep track of all of that would exhaust you completely. You’re a part of 50 different channels, 10 mailing groups, 5 social events every week, 3 new sprints you’re working on, 2 reviews that are coming up, 2 citizenship projects you’ve signed up for and so on… You lose sight of where the industry is headed outside of this bubble. You miss out on the interesting trends, new technology developments, ideas and discourse completely. After a while you’re so mired into the company’s way of doing things that you actually stop having original free-thinking ideas completely. This becomes a cause for major concern.

• It’s usually very hard to directly speak to your users. There are various policies in place to go through before you can start recruiting users for research conversations. You first have to sign up for research training, manager approvals, sometimes even sign NDAs from legal… all of this before you even start thinking about the type of users you want to speak to. Then planning out the studies, recruiting participants, scheduling, interviewing, synthesizing and socializing the results. We’re looking at a 3 month window to maybe learn 3-5 insights. Tiring.

• Long-time employees are too institutionalized and become a pain to collaborate with. You’d get tired of hearing how ‘this was already tried in Q3 last year’ and how it didn’t work at all. These are the hardest people to align on new ideas and fresh thinking. They have a lot of value to offer, especially their past context, but the lack of willingness to try new things becomes a major hindrance in working with them.

Career advancement and talent management

• Performance evaluation systems are too rigid and don’t reward outsized performance fairly. These systems are designed for ‘all designers’ in mind and not the best designers in mind. They actually end up becoming the most painful for folks who want to beat the curve, do more, go outside of their line of duty and deliver outsized results. There’s very little provision in the perf systems to reward them. Most A players still end up getting force-fitted onto the bell curves. This means that they have to resort to playing the perf system – do things that the system likes. Not what needs to be done for the users or the company.

• Career advancement rewards visible metrics, not better user experiences. Craft, polish, delight are very hard to measure. What’s hard to measure is hard to reward. The incentives aren’t really set up well for designers to fight hard for that last mile polish. They’d rather focus on moving the metric linked with the OKR and getting the promotion.

• Political skill becomes more important than design skill. There’s all kinds of designers in large companies. It’s a spectrum. The best designers wouldn’t want to be the ‘cause trouble’ by giving the critical feedback that is necessary to elevate craft. People push back once or twice and then lay low. They don’t fight with persistence for the right thing.

• Brilliant designers end up reporting to mediocre managers. Exceptional individual contributors often report to ineffective managers who aren’t great designers themselves, effectively limiting the organization’s most talented people. These managers fail to empower their talented reports and elevate their work to the desired visibility. This hampers the growth of the org’s best people.

• There’s no reward for fixing things. There’s a great reward for creating new things. This one’s quite obvious. We’ve all seen people chasing shiny new projects and fighting hard to win that project allocation. Nobody wants to sit and do the boring job of fixing and cleaning up things. There are no awards for that.

Quality and craft issues

• Leadership’s taste and curation skills weaken when they stop ‘making’ things. Design leaders who aren’t involved in hands-on strategic product design problems lose their ability to provide valuable guidance. Now they don’t need to focus on pixels per se, that’s not what I mean. But they absolutely need to have a point of view on systems thinking and strong idea of the curation principles to apply so that the entire company’s suite of products follow a coherent ‘style’. But if the leader isn’t plugged in and thinking about these deeply enough, the team no longer gets the directive they need to keep the work focused around a singular style. Lethargy and complacency sets in quicker than you think.

• Design leaders who compromise too often lose the ability to demand quality later. Compromises are okay. But only compromises are not okay. It takes real judgment to form an opinion on when to allow for compromises and when to push the team to do better. Good leaders know where the line is and know how to enforce it. In large companies though, design leadership often gets steamrolled by their product and engineering counterparts and then such precedents become the norm.

• Precedents are very hard to undo once set. Orgs run by the kind of precedents they set. Something done once becomes a record in the org and gets used again and again as an example (good or bad) in the future. If a bad precedent is set in a forum where the designer wans’t present, they could still likely bear consequences of that precedent far into the future. Read the Broken Window Theory. When

• Quality has to navigate past those who don’t have the skills to discern it. We’ve all heard of the value of building a shared vocabulary. In large companies you’d often see strategic decks that define what ‘product quality’ means and what the North Star should be for the org. These aren’t meant for designers as much as they are for the crossfunctional partners. It’s because at the end of the day, the entire org is the gatekeeper of quality and that’s a lot of people involved. Most don’t have the right eye to understand what quality is.

• When everyone influences the product, no one feels responsible for its quality. Quality regresses to the mean of all involved stakeholders. It’s so common to see a rockstar designer lose their entire appetite for quality when paired with stakeholders who have the same influence on the product without the ability.

Time and resource allocation

• Large organizations kill your focus. The average day isn’t conducive to deep blocks of focus time that’s required to produce great design work (or any work for that matter). You see designers haplessly strung between meetings, Slack, updates, 1:1s and stuff. Trying to jam in 1-2 hours of focus work on a busy afternoon is plain sad. That’s not how you build great products. That’s not a Maker’s Schedule.

• The work around the work takes so much effort. Large companies have a lot of perforative forums. And in order to be a nice citizen, you have to maintain visibility in them.Being a “team player” requires participation in many meetings and conversations. It requires you to present your ideas multiple times in different forums over days and weeks. Designers are expected to socialize their work to build consensus. Tiring.

• When it’s finally time for those delightful touches that make the experience great, the designer is already exhausted. The path to push work forward is quite involved and full of debates, presentations, reviews, approvals. Adding user delight into the experience is often discarded in light of the sheer amount of justifications it would require to bake it into the experience.

• Stigma against shipping late but shipping better. You seldom see orgs pushing ship dates to later when the experience isn’t quite ready in terms of product quality. Design bugs are hastily tested in the squished up timeline between a demo being ready and the pressure of the upcoming go-live date. The struggle between wanting to file all possible design bugs and knowing you’d have to cull out half of those in the name of ‘severity marking’ is a common one.

Priorities and metrics

• What can’t be measured in a dashboard doesn’t get prioritized. Orgs love numbers. It’s the only way to anchor conversations to objectivity. With design, our vocabulary hasn’t really evolved enough around user delight, polish or fit and finish. These factors don’t sit in the same strata as the funnel metrics.

• User acquisition often trumps user satisfaction. You’d think only startups optimize for growth… not true. Large companies need to chase growth equally aggressively. In that, the prioritization naturally shifts towards building new and shiny things that attract more users or new segments of users versus improving the products that are already used by millions of users. This is why many marquee products get stuck in time. Year over year you see no improvements in them. Some bugs live long enough to even get added to the hall of fame.

• Trying to please every users creates experiences nobody loves. Large companies operate at a massive scale. With that, you have to make safe decisions that are defensive. Decisions that ‘piss off’ the least number of users instead of ‘delighting’ a chosen few. If you ask which users the product should prioritize, the answer you’d hear would be ‘everyone’. Nobody likes any metric going down. This prevents you from really going deep into building for a particular user segment that loves using your product.

Morale and motivation

• Many passionate designers give up after hitting the same walls repeatedly. After several failed attempts to improve problematic products, even highly motivated designers can lose hope. It’s disheartening to see enthusiastic new hires lose their flame of excitement, when they go from being the catalysts for new ideas to being frustrated and resigned. This loss of energy and agency can be very damaging for the company.

• Large companies typically celebrate the effort, not the quality of the outcomes. If you’ve seen launches in large companies from the inside, you might notice how telling the internal celebrations can be – “glad we got this out” rather than “look how amazing it turned out.” Many large companies become rigid and slow to the point where just launching something is celebrated as an achievement.

The most frustrating aspect of this situation is that we know better design is possible. The solutions aren’t mysterious or unachievable. They require organizational courage, leadership that genuinely values quality over expediency, and systems that empower rather than constrain talented designers.

While all of this is largely true and evident, there are still large companies around that have successfully fought against these challenges and continued to maintain exceptional design cultures.

Notion is a large company but operates with a very lean design team. Their products (a few performance issues aside) are top notch in their thinking and execution.

Facebook for a long time had an exceptional design culture despite their size and scale. Even today their products exhibit high craft and finesse in the quality of the products.

Airbnb continues to maintain a very high bar of excellence despite being a seriously large public company. Same goes for Apple at almost 30x the scale of Airbnb.

You can have positive or negative opinions about their products. But it’s an undeniable fact that all those companies have worked extremely hard to preserve the culture of great intentional design, high craft, polish and attention to detail. All of that despite being very large and having the same problems that other companies have had.

And that’s extremely commendable.