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
"Non-designers can build wireframes really quickly using easy drag-and-drop components from a design system."
Billy CarlsonTips to Utilize Wireframes to Tell an Effective Product Story
June 6, 2023
"Design leaders actually like having a strategic partner to focus on the how and when so they can focus on the what and why."
John CalhounHave we Reached Our Peak? Spotting the Next Mountain For DesignOps to Climb
October 1, 2021
"The three-in-the-box model means having marketing, engineering, and UX leaders working collaboratively."
David Cronin Uday Gajendar Peter Morville Kendra ShimmellDiscussion
May 13, 2015
"Recruiting sucks, especially in enterprise B2B, so building robust recruiting pipelines and processes was critical for us."
Brad Orego Ned DwyerBringing Customer Research to More Internal Teams
March 10, 2022
"Agency style staffing allows designers to bring learnings across multiple projects and grow through new challenges."
Alicia MootyDesign Staffing Models
September 30, 2021
"It’s a moral obligation for organizations to engage with research and ethics; being mature is not optional anymore."
Megan Blocker Lada Gorlenko Fatimah Richmond Molly StevensWhat UX research maturity looks like and how we get there [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
November 9, 2023
"If you don’t trust it, then there’s nothing here."
Daniel J. RosenbergDesigning with and for Artificial Intelligence
August 11, 2022
"Sharing our playbook with engineering helped push design diversity thinking beyond our own team up to the C-suite level."
Michelle MorrisonCulture Design
May 21, 2020
"Knowledge can be dangerous and misused, but democratizing access helps self-regulate by enabling fact checking."
Matt DuignanHITS, Microsoft's internal human insight system: From research library to living body of knowledge
July 16, 2019
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
How can designers identify which parts of a system they can influence or should monitor using affordance mapping?
How do AI-powered experiences complicate predicting and optimizing customer behavior?
How can visualization techniques demonstrate the measurable impact of behind-the-scenes service design work?