Rosenverse
Customer-Centered Design Organizations

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Customer-Centered Design Organizations

Gold
Thursday, June 8, 2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Share the love for this talk
Customer-Centered Design Organizations
Speakers: Peter Merholz
Link:

Summary

How do we shape design organizations to always be in service of the user? Peter Merholz talks about how everything changed when he focused on getting the organization operations correct instead of just getting the design right. Peter Merholz is the VP of Design at Snagajob and the co-author of "Org Design for Design Orgs."

Key Insights

  • Great user experiences require aligning design strategy, execution, and organizational structure, not just individual designer skills.

  • Centralized design teams offer community and consistency but often struggle with strategic influence and slow delivery.

  • Decentralized embedded designers gain ownership and speed but suffer loneliness, skill narrowing, and fractured experiences.

  • A hybrid centralized partnership model balances dedicated design skill teams with close collaboration across product teams.

  • Organizing product, design, and engineering teams around customer types and journeys creates more coherent, customer-focused solutions.

  • Strong team leadership is crucial: leaders must manage down (team empowerment), across (stakeholder relationships), and up (executive communication).

  • Design organizations benefit from diverse skill sets beyond interaction and visual design, including content strategy and research.

  • Clear, shared definitions of design quality and brand experience principles enable designers to be bold and focused.

  • Leaders must be willing to say no to overextension, preserving capacity to deliver high-quality design work.

  • Relying solely on process without attention to the content and quality of the work leads to mediocrity and frustration.

Notable Quotes

"Execution is in service of the user."

"It’s not enough to have great people; you need to create the space that brings out the best in them."

"Centralized design teams tend to be brought in after decisions are made, turning design into an us versus them relationship."

"Designers embedded in teams often feel lonely and their work leads to fractured user experiences."

"Organize your product managers, designers, and engineers around customers, not features or code repositories."

"Design is always going to be subjective, so you have to figure out what quality looks like in your organization."

"If you want your teams to be bold, you need explicit quality standards and the courage to say no."

"Team leadership means managing down to empower your team, managing across to build stakeholder relationships, and managing up with executives."

"Relying on process is not a proxy for quality, and divorcing process from content is a fatal enterprise mistake."

"When the design team is organized into coherent teams working across multiple squads, designers feel more supported and less isolated."

Ask the Rosenbot
Farid Sabitov
Theme Four Intro
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Dan Willis
Enterprise Storytelling Sessions
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Edward Cupps
The Principal Path: Journeying from Management to Individual Contributor
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
John Cutler
Prioritization for designers and product managers (1st of 3 seminars)
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Yasmine Khan
Checking Bias and Listening to Financially Vulnerable Americans
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Daniela Magaña Flores
Ahead of Competition: Learn What UX Benchmarking Can Do for Your Business Today
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Elena Naids
The Power of Difficult Conversations: A Case Study on How We Introduced Design Ops in the Federal Government Space
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Cornelius Rachieru
Handling Complexity: Framing a Scale of Design
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Peter Van Dijck
Building the Rosenbot
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Daniel Korczynski
Why AI Is Bad at Research (and how to make it actually useful)
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold
Katy Mogal
But Do Your Insights Scale?
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Sarah Fathallah
Lessening the Research Burden on Vulnerable Communities
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Fisayo Osilaja
[Demo] The AI edge: From researcher to strategist
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Jess Greco
Creating a Basis for Change: Scaling Design Maturity
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Corey Long
Hiring in DesignOps: A Critical Study on How to Hire and Get Hired
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Kristen Guth, Ph.D.
Out of the FOG: A Non-traditional Research Approach to Alignment
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold

More Videos

Sahibzada Mayed

"What role does time play as a form of currency in contributing to extractive methods of research?"

Sahibzada Mayed

The Politics of Radical Research: A Manifesto

March 27, 2023

Rusha Sopariwala

"Sticky notes and whiteboards just wouldn’t translate online, so our collaboration rituals had to change."

Rusha Sopariwala

Remote, Together: Craft and Collaboration Across Disciplines, Borders, Time Zones, and a Design Org of 170+

June 9, 2022

Christopher Taylor Edwards

"Empathy and trust develop through working together, not in isolation."

Christopher Taylor Edwards Valerie Roske

Design as a Team Practice, A Practical Guide to Cross-functional Collaboration

September 30, 2021

Todd Healy

"People think automation will replace authenticity, but right now, human intervention is still required to ensure quality."

Todd Healy Jess Greco

Driving Change with CX Metrics

June 7, 2023

Christian Crumlish

"I use AI throughout every part of the design process, from strategy to prototyping to creating UIs."

Christian Crumlish Erika Flowers Benjamin Jackson Adekunle Oduye

From tools to staff: What the next generation of agents means for the future of design

June 10, 2026

Gina Mendolia

"Once collaboration loops start compounding, they become muscle memory and the structure supports our work."

Gina Mendolia Jasmine Toy

Coordinated collaboration: a Service Design & DesignOps love story

November 19, 2025

Steve Baty

"When innovation cuts directly at people’s control over their work, fear and hesitancy are inevitable."

Steve Baty

Breaking Out of Ruts: Tips for Overcoming the Fear of Change

June 9, 2016

Wyatt Hayman

"Non-research teams can use the panels easily — one program manager arranged interviews with hosts in 6 countries within a week."

Wyatt Hayman

Global Research Panels

August 8, 2020

Iram Shah

"I may be ruining his experience because I’m forgetting it’s his experience, not mine."

Iram Shah

Closing Keynote: The View from the Top

June 4, 2019