Flip the ratio

For as long as digital products have existed, one designer has worked with five, ten, twenty engineers. Coding was the slow, expensive part.

AI changed this. Code that used to take a month now takes days, but many organizations aren’t seeing higher velocity. Because speed is now constrained elsewhere: design has become the bottleneck because development is so much faster now.

So a few months back I jokingly proposed a simple solution: flip the ratio. Twenty designers for every engineer. Problem solved. You’re welcome.

Except it has stopped being a joke. At 2FRESH, we’ve already worked on projects where the design budget is double the engineering budget. When making things is cheap, deciding what to make — and making it good — is where the value goes.