Customer-Centered Design Organizations
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
"Our behavior is implicit messaging; we need both explicit and implicit signals to support resilience on teams."
Bria Alexander Laura Gatewood Corey Long Daniel Orbach Laine Prokay Deanna SmithThe Big Question about Resilience: A panel discussion
September 23, 2024
"You have to have a point of view, and you have to lead in order to get that impact in strategic foresight."
Sam LadnerHow Research Can Drive Strategic Foresight
March 9, 2022
"Evergreen content needs a strong perspective on why the topic matters along with practical examples on how to apply it."
Louis RosenfeldCoffee with Lou: Should You Write a (UX) Book?
March 7, 2024
"Sometimes with kids, you just have to get artifactual data or creative outputs because they can’t always articulate."
Mila Kuznetsova Lucy DentonHow Lessons Learned from Our Youngest Users Can Help Us Evolve our Practices
March 9, 2022
"Critiques help teams stop being the lone ranger and instead iterate faster together with purpose and clarity."
Joseph MeersmanSweating the Pixel: Scaling Quality through Critique
June 10, 2021
"I’ve nearly bought products in my sleep because I memorized the key presses from consistent checkout flows."
Sam ProulxOnline Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
June 7, 2023
"Always remember the power of your values in times of doubt and change; lean into what your team really stands for."
Kim Holt Emma Wylds Pearl Koppenhaver Maisee XiongA Salesforce Panel Discussion on Values-Driven DesignOps
September 8, 2022
"A design system that isn't dynamic and doesn't allow contributions from across the company is probably going to become stale quickly."
Dave Malouf Amy ThibodeauPanel: Design Systems and Documentation
November 7, 2017
"Without physical health, we cannot have creative health, and then we cannot have organizational health."
Alana WashingtonTheme 1: Introduction and Provocation
January 8, 2024
