Rosenverse

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
Kat Vellos
Opener: The Other L Word
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Yasmine Khan
Checking Bias and Listening to Financially Vulnerable Americans
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Nalini Kotamraju
Research After UX
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Erin Weigel
Get Your Whole Team Testing to Design for Impact
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Nina Jurcic
The Design System Rollercoaster: From Enabler and Bottleneck to Catalyst for Change
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Lin Nie
When Thought-worlds Collide: Collaborating Between Research and Practice
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Tricia Wang
From Users to Shapers of AI: The Future of Research
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Gabrielle Verderber
Documentation Your Team Will Actually Use
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Harry Max
Failure Friday #5: Lessons from a SaaS Design Failure
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Louis Rosenfeld
Opening Remarks
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Jim Kalbach
Jobs To Be Done
2021 • Enterprise Community
John Paul de Guzman
10k Screens Later: How We Became a Data-Driven Design Organization
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Ryan Matthew
DesignOps without Boundaries: Building More with What You Have
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Jon Fukuda
All the Ops: Successful cross-functional collaboration
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Bria Alexander
OKRs—Helpful or Harmful?
2022 • DesignOps Community
Uday Gajendar
The Rise of Meta-Design: A Starter Playbook
2022 • Enterprise Community

More Videos

Dave Gray

"Executive air cover is having someone in a senior role who protects and supports the design team from other business pressures."

Dave Gray

Group Activity: Making Sense of DesignOps

November 7, 2017

Kat Vellos

"If a person has a human moment that’s grounds for dismissal, it ends up muting my personality."

Kat Vellos

Opener: The Other L Word

January 8, 2024

Boon Yew Chew

"Change doesn’t happen because we made a product; change happens through how people respond and behave."

Boon Yew Chew

Making Sense of Systems—and Using Systems to Make Sense of the Enterprise

June 6, 2023

Lada Gorlenko

"Growth in your career doesn’t always have to be vertical; sometimes sideways or diagonal moves help you stay true to yourself."

Lada Gorlenko

Theme 3: Introduction

June 10, 2021

Doug Powell

"Good design is good business."

Doug Powell

Closing Keynote: Design at Scale

November 8, 2018

Jemma Ahmed

"Ultimately, we’re all here to help our companies care about the customer faster, no matter the tribe or method."

Jemma Ahmed

Bringing together market and user research

October 17, 2019

Tricia Wang

"Systematizing work and using matrices of importance versus difficulty helps prioritize meaningful projects."

Tricia Wang

SCALE: Discussion

June 15, 2018

Landon Barnes

"If you measure an infinite number of customers, every change would be statistically significant, but not every change would be meaningful."

Landon Barnes

Are My Research Findings Actually Meaningful?

March 10, 2022

Jack Moffett

"PI Planning really helps visualize dependencies between teams, which was invisible before."

Jack Moffett

SAFe or Sorry?

May 29, 2019