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."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Feature roadmaps are bad because over time coherent actions become noise."
Adam ThomasSurvival Metrics – Making Change in a Fast, Data-Informed, and Politically Safe Way
December 6, 2022
"Each organization's design ops team looks a little different, but the foundations are the same."
Jilanna WilsonDistributed DesignOps Management
February 26, 2019
"We’re the voice of the employee—we’re arbiters of truth, defenders of experience, and sometimes validators against manipulation."
Kristin WisnewskiMeasuring What Matters
October 23, 2019
"I prefer techniques where individuals generate ideas quietly first, so their train of thought isn’t lost in group dynamics."
Steve Baty Richard Dalton Maria Giudice Harry MaxDiscussion
June 9, 2016
"It’s not about the diagram, it’s about the dialogue."
Saara Kamppari-Miller"Prototype" vs "Prototype"--Breaking Down and Rebuilding Our Understanding of What We Do
October 24, 2019
"We treat the design system like a software product with a backlog, QA, and a product owner prioritizing feature requests."
David Cronin Uday Gajendar Peter Morville Kendra ShimmellDiscussion
May 13, 2015
"I find the existing patterns in my product and use those because it’s easier to bring things back in."
Billy CarlsonTips to Utilize Wireframes to Tell an Effective Product Story
June 6, 2023
"The estuary is highly resilient but also very sensitive to industrial waste—creative collaboration areas in organizations are similar."
John CutlerOxbows, Rivers, and Estuaries: How to navigate the currents of change (without burning out)
December 3, 2024
"When I pitched the investment plan, CFOs and board members nodded because it was expressed in their language."
How to Identify and Increase your "Experience Quotient"
June 15, 2018
