Super nice work! Couple of more thoughts I had:
- Non-OSS design teams are lead by business goals (at least to some extent) while the goals could be a lot more abstract or intangible in OSS orgs, wouldn’t this make things a bit more complicated? Designers are closer to product management in this space so would designers be setting the goals?
- Designers wear a lot of hats in smaller orgs, so would a bigger team with specialised designer roles (eg, researcher, designer, copy, etc) have anything to do with the maturity? Thinking about it in comparison to dev roles in orgs can also be helpful
- Love the idea behind user led where users are fully integrated
