Roles and teams
Generalist and specialist
Also calledSpecialisation, T-shaped designer
A generalist covers the whole design process; a specialist goes deep on one part of it, such as research or design systems.
Early teams need generalists: designers who can run a quick study in the morning and ship a polished screen in the afternoon. As a team grows, some of that work becomes big enough to justify a specialist, such as a UX researcher or a design systems designer.
Specialisation has a cost that is easy to miss. With a fixed headcount, every specialist means fewer product designers, so each remaining designer covers more engineers.