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
Mansi Gupta
Drawing from Feminist Practice to Make Inclusive Design Operational
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Aletheia Delivre
New Shapes and Emerging Identities for Design Ops
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Yoel Sumitro
Actions and Reflections: Bridging the Skills Gap among Researchers
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Cornelius Rachieru
Handling Complexity: Framing a Scale of Design
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Sarah Coyle
Design and Analytics with Sarah Coyle
2020 • DesignOps Community
Kevin Bethune
Reimagining Design: Unlocking Strategic Innovation
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Chris Geison
What's Next for Research?
2021 • Advancing Research Community
Ali Jeffery
How DesignOps Helped Enable Wall Street to Work Remotely
2020 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Dante Guintu
How to Crush the Talent Crunch
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Welcome / Housekeeping
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Marc Majers
Interrupted UX - Add A Dose of Reality To Usability Testing
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
John Calhoun
Bring your DesignOps Story to Life! The Definitive DesignOps Book Jam
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Yalenka Mariën
Designing for Digital Inclusion in the Belgian Government
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Kara Kane
Theme One Intro
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Emilia Åström
Unlock Your Team’s Intelligence with Collaboration Design
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Taylor Jennings
Repository Retrospective: Learnings from Introducing a Central Place for UX Research
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold

More Videos

Johanna Kollmann

"The product leadership really doesn’t see the value in research and they’re thinking about shutting the research team down."

Johanna Kollmann

Insights-Driven Product Strategy: Get your Research to Count

December 6, 2022

Adrian Howard

"90% of everything is crud."

Adrian Howard

Sturgeon’s Biases

September 25, 2024

Deanna Washington

"I’m still early on in measuring accessibility impact but tying early bug fixes to ROI is promising."

Deanna Washington Bria Alexander Jon Fukuda Saara Kamppari-Miller Farid Sabitov

Connecting the Ops: Plenary Panel and Closing Circle

September 9, 2022

Deirdre Hirschtritt

"Flour is the core structure of our relationships. Like gluten makes dough stronger, background research makes relationships stronger."

Deirdre Hirschtritt Cesar Paredes Marie Perrot

Research is Only as Good as the Relationships You Build

November 17, 2022

Anna Avrekh

"Being human, authentic, humble, and showing vulnerability can take you a long way as a research leader."

Anna Avrekh Dr. John Pagonis Klara Pelcl Sina Schreiber

Expert Panel: Leading in and with Research

March 10, 2022

John Taschek

"Success is about relationships: one person stopping you in the hallway to say hi is more valuable than many formal meetings."

John Taschek

Making People the X-Factor in the Enterprise

June 15, 2018

Amy Gawronski Zuccaro

"Nobody has all the answers and we're human. That's okay."

Amy Gawronski Zuccaro

Advice for DesignOps Employee #1

September 29, 2021

Fatimah Richmond

"Corporate leaders don’t know how to integrate design leaders beyond the design org."

Fatimah Richmond

The Future of ReOps as a Strategic Function: A Roadmap for Getting There

March 25, 2024

Marieke McCloskey

"I invited Mark to a user interview — he had no idea interviewing wasn’t for him but respected that skill deeply."

Marieke McCloskey

User Science: Product Analytics & User Research

March 11, 2021