Design teams are getting smaller. The orgs that come out of it with design still at the table aren't the ones that were structured best. They're the ones where design leadership had already earned enough trust to survive that conversation.
I've led design inside 7 organizations. Built teams from scratch, inherited teams mid-crisis, and restructured orgs that had grown past the model that originally built them.
The question I get asked most: centralized or embedded?
It's the wrong question.
Structure is just the container. What actually determines whether a design org has real influence is whether the design leader has enough organizational trust to make cross-functional calls stick. Not positional authority. Not headcount.
Trust.
You can have a perfectly structured team with zero influence. You can have a messy, distributed team with a leader who has the right relationships and ships consistently excellent work.
The org chart is visible. The actual leverage is not.
Compression is the stress test that exposes the difference. The teams that lose their best people, get further marginalized, and never recover are the ones in which design had access but no influence. The ones that survive it — and sometimes come out stronger — are the ones where that trust was already built before anyone started counting seats.
So before you restructure your design team, ask a more honest question first: Does the current structure fail because of how it's set up, or because of how much trust design leadership has actually earned?
Those require completely different fixes. And only one of them shows up on an org chart.