Month-by-month feed of what shifted, who was hiring, and how Starter, Scaler, and Titan teams actually worked.
61 synthesized monthsin the data layer. Stage breakdowns (Starter / Scaler / Titan) are available for 2026 only — earlier months show under the All segment but won’t appear under stage filters until the design-context pipeline runs further back.
Solo operators and tiny teams run personal software and agent fleets. The studio is one person with taste.
Claude → Cursor → Figma Make
At this scale the person with taste is the entire company. Everything else is tooling.
Series A-B teams run flat. One CD, a Design Engineer or two, and apprentices learning taste on the job.
Figma (canvas + Make) → Cursor → in-house agent orchestration
Solo operators ship full products and brands in a weekend using agent stacks they assembled themselves.
Figma Make → Cursor → Claude
At pre-seed, one person owns the whole surface. They write the code, set the brand, and direct the agents. There is no handoff because there is no one to hand off to.
Series A and B teams run with half the designers they would have hired in 2024, and twice the seniority.
Cursor → internal agent orchestration → Figma + Make
One person, full stack, ships everything
Figma → v0 → Midjourney
Vibe-coding closed the gap between design and production; the founder's designer has to live in both or they're half useful.
First real design team, already fighting agent sprawl
Figma → v0 → Cursor
At Series A-B the CD sets direction for both the agent fleet and the humans learning taste. It's the only role that scales both ways.
Large companies run small human design teams on top of heavy agent infrastructure. The rebuilt entry-level program is a formal apprenticeship.
Figma enterprise → internal agent platforms → Cursor/Claude Code
Large orgs need a human taste layer that can direct both machines and people. That role sits above the agent stack and owns the output.
The person who can write the code and hold the taste is the single most valuable hire at this stage. They collapse two roles and remove a handoff.
Enterprise design orgs rebuild the bottom rung on purpose — apprenticeships, residencies, and taste training replace the old junior pipeline.
Figma enterprise → internal model gateways → custom evals for brand and product taste
At scale, the job is keeping a point of view consistent across thousands of agent-generated surfaces. That is a director's job, and it is the one role every large org is actively hiring for.
At this stage the system is what keeps agent output coherent; the person who owns that system owns every screen the company ships.
Design governance is now a product requirement
Runway → Storybook → Adobe Firefly
At scale, taste and judgment applied to machine output is the lever — the director who can steer agent work across an org is worth more than any single executor.