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
Sean Fitzell
Craft of User Research: Building Out Jobs to be Done Maps
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Libby Maurer
Treating Diversity & Inclusion in Hiring as a Design Problem
2019 • Enterprise Community
Adrian Howard
Sturgeon’s Biases
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Anna Nguyen
Why Our Voice of the Customer is Better Than Yours
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Ana Ferreira
Designing Distributed: Leading Doist’s Fully Remote Design Team in Six Countries
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Peter Merholz
Design at Scale is People!
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Sofia Quintero
Beyond Tools: The Messy Business of Implementing Research Repositories
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Nathan Shedroff
Double Your Mileage: Use Your Research Strategically
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Josina Vink
Navigating the pitfalls of systems thinking in service design
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
Dr. Jamika D. Burge
The Future of Research: Bridging the Gaps
2021 • Advancing Research Community
Stefanie Owens
Optimizing for Outcomes: Transformation Design in Systems at Scale
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
Marc Fonteijn
Increase your confidence, influence, and impact (through a Professional Community)
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
Dawn Ressel
Full-Stack User Experiences: A Marriage of Design and Technology
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Leah Buley
Ask Me Anything with Leah Buley and Joe Natoli, co-authors of The User Experience Team of One (2nd edition)
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Brigette Metzler
Research Repositories: A global project by the ResearchOps Community
2020 • Advancing Research Community
Dan Ward
Failure Friday #1 with Dan Ward
2025 • Rosenfeld Community

More Videos

Brian Moss

"Researchers are professionals; we need to set clear expectations but then trust them to do their jobs effectively."

Brian Moss

What Does it Mean to be a Resilient Research Team?

March 9, 2022

Michaela Mora

"Concept testing is about testing ideas before development to confirm there is a real need for the product."

Michaela Mora

Advanced Concept Testing Approaches To Guide Product Development and Business Decisions

March 11, 2022

Amy Bucher

"Surprisingly, when nudging vaccines, consumers preferred seeing every eligible vaccine listed, even controversial ones like COVID-19."

Amy Bucher

Harnessing behavioral science to uncover deeper truths

March 12, 2025

Alana Washington

"Demand is ultimately outstripping supply, and carrier rates are rising, pushing up prices for shippers."

Alana Washington

(Remote) Service Design: A Transformation Case Study

June 8, 2022

Dharani Perera

"De-risking sessions gave disgruntled stakeholders a forum to voice fears before larger workshops."

Dharani Perera

The mandala of service design: unlocking alignment and action through service design

November 20, 2025

Brenna Fallon

"If you get a perfect OKR score, it means you didn’t set your sights high enough."

Brenna Fallon

Learning Over Outcomes

October 24, 2019

Jemma Ahmed

"No one knows yet exactly what bringing truth to power means, and that’s the beauty of it."

Jemma Ahmed

Theme 2 Intro

March 26, 2024

Lija Hogan

"Sometimes accommodating 20% of users with special needs improves the experience for the entire 100%."

Lija Hogan

Contexts of Use: A Framework for Connection

December 9, 2021

Nathan Curtis

"A design system is done not when the style guide is launched, but when it positively impacts customer experience."

Nathan Curtis

Beyond the Toolkit: Spreading a System Across People & Products

June 9, 2016