Lessons from leading design at Grubhub

I’ve spent much of my career helping scale design teams. More recently, across several different B2B teams at Grubhub - Corporate, Merchant, and B2B marketplace. The one thing that became pretty clear is how easy it is for design to fall into a support role.

It’s not because the designers aren’t good, but because of how the team was set up and how it shows up in the work. A lot of teams say they want design to be strategic. But, few actually structure things in a way that makes that even possible.

One of the biggest shifts on my team was realizing that if design is only showing up once there’s a defined problem, it’s already too late. At that point, you’re refining someone else’s thinking instead of helping to shape it. I saw this pretty clearly in the B2B space. Our work would come through already scoped, already prioritized, and design’s role was to make it usable. Yes, that’s important, but it’s not where the real leverage is.

What started to work better for us was pulling design upstream. It was not in a performative way, but in a way where designers were actually part of early conversations with product and engineering teams. It was less of waiting for a clean brief, and more helping define what the problem even was. It sounds obvious, but it took a real effort on my end to make that mindset the default instead of the exception.

Another element that mattered more than I expected was how our senior designers show up on the team.

You can’t scale a team just by adding more people. They need people who can operate without waiting for direction, especially in more ambiguous or competitive spaces. I spent a lot of time with our Senior and Staff Designers getting them more embedded in planning, and not just execution. That meant being in the room earlier, but also being comfortable pushing on priorities and not just reacting to things.

That shift doesn’t always happen automatically. There’s a lot of strong designers that are used to being rewarded for craft and output. But, stepping into a more strategic role is a different type of skill. It’s way messier. There isn’t always a clear right answer. You’re sometimes making judgment calls with incomplete information.

Some people can lean into that quickly and others need more support. But, once it clicks, the impact is pretty noticeable on a team. The conversations start to change and design stops being about screens and starts being about the direction we are going.

The last thing that became important as the team grew was just having some structure underneath all of it.

Not with a bunch of heavy process, but enough to keep things from getting chaotic. We had older B2B products that were all over the place from a design standpoint, and it slowed everything down. Having us moving toward a more consistent system in Figma helped more than I expected. The same was true for tightening up how we ran critiques and how we connected design work back to actual business outcomes.

Another thing that helped was having design bring customer insights more directly into our product conversations. It was not just a report that sat in docs, but was something that was brought up up regularly when teams are making decisions. That was a small shift, but it changed the tone of the discussion towards our users.

I know none of this is especially groundbreaking on its own, but it’s mostly about basic things done consistently. But that’s kind of the point. Scaling a design team isn’t really about adding layers to the cake or putting more process in place. To me, it’s about making sure the team is set up to influence the work, not just respond to it.

If that piece is working, everything else tends to follow.