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
"Why are messaging apps asking for my health and fitness information to just send a message?"
Matteo GrattonCan Data and Ethics Live Together?
October 1, 2021
"Sometimes you feel really alone in government design because the services are siloed and fragmented."
Jaskiran KangWhy Community is Key to Professionalizing Design
October 28, 2022
"You are either navigating with a white cane or a service dog because you are not gonna want both of your hands full."
Kate KalcevichDesigning inclusively with AI
June 5, 2024
"Traditional usability labs often force assistive tech users to use unfamiliar setups, creating barriers."
Sam ProulxSUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
June 9, 2021
"We need to have a planet before we can have dignity, and sustainability and accessibility are tied basic human rights."
Ned Gartside Mike Gifford Zoe Lopez-Latorre Tzviya SiegmanNavigating accessibility and climate
April 17, 2024
"Democratization is not research anarchy where anybody can talk to any customer for any reason with no oversight."
Jemma Ahmed Steve Carrod Chris Geison Dr. Shadi Janansefat Christopher NashDemocratization: Working with it, not against it [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
July 24, 2024
"Slides are hitting a brick wall; video clips make findings much more interactive and engaging for stakeholders."
Taylor Jennings Joe Nelson Alex KnollRepository Retrospective: Learnings from Introducing a Central Place for UX Research
March 9, 2022
"62% of people said literally we don't know how to measure the value of design ops yet."
Kristin Skinner Kamdyn MooreGroup Activity: A Deep Dive Into Value and Outcomes
October 23, 2019
"A lot of these companies have founders or investors who are themselves doctors or diabetic patients."
Daniel J. RosenbergDigital Medicine Design
September 26, 2019
