Customer-Centered Design Organizations
Summary
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
"You’re not just convincing people of the value but the benefit to them of working with you on the product journey."
Christian Crumlish Wendy Johansson Rich Mironov Aditi Ruiz Adam ThomasAfternoon Insights Panel
December 6, 2022
"It’s important to create a clear value proposition that ties your work to the larger organizational mission."
Jackie AjouxLeveling-Up: A Single-Player’s Guide to the DesignOps Team-of-One
January 8, 2024
"Power sharing requires behavior change, reflection, and descending about expertise."
Natalia RadywylCo-Designing New Power in Australia's Public Sector
November 16, 2022
"Miles gave them the music as they entered the studio; they didn’t know what they were going to be playing."
Jim KalbachJazz Improvisation as a Model for Team Collaboration
June 4, 2019
"Our bodies profoundly influence the way that we think about ourselves, others, the world, and everything in it."
Dane DeSutterKeeping the Body in Mind: What Gestures and Embodied Actions Tell You That Users May Not
March 26, 2024
"In decentralized teams, the risk is redundant insights and lack of cumulative knowledge."
Jen Cardello Dr. Shadi Janansefat Alex WrightCurating insight: Strategies for integrating knowledge across research functions
March 11, 2025
"Learning should be an experience tailored around the learner, not the curriculum."
Kristin SkinnerFive Years of DesignOps
September 29, 2021
"That’s the kind of feature that never would have made it to the top of anyone’s backlog without design."
Gretchen AndersonScaling the Human Center
June 8, 2017
"We need designers who can balance flexibility with ownership and bring entrepreneurial leadership to a complex landscape."
Jose Coronado Julie Gitlin Lawrence LipkinPeople First - Design at JP Morgan
June 10, 2021
