In my experience, the max ratio that you should have for engineers to designers is eight to one. In some companies, the ratio will be way higher than that. In my experience, the ratio is almost never lower than that.

When you’ve got a ratio of eight to one, chances are you’ll be designing multiple projects simultaneously. And chances are, you may be a solo designer on each project.

This can become problematic because each project comes with its own set of context.

As a designer, you load all of that context into your brain as you’re exploring various avenues for solving a problem.

This can become problematic when you go to other designers within your team for feedback. As they likely won’t have the same level of context as you do.

One way around this is to create a design buddy system. You basically pair up designers as buddies. Each designer does a little bit of extra work to understand each other’s projects. The net result, being that when you go to solicit feedback, another designer already has the context for your project in their head.