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
"Ethical technology governance means anticipating the long-term social impacts of technology today and acting to protect essential public goods."
Ilana LipsettAnticipating Risk, Regulating Tech: A Playbook for Ethical Technology Governance
December 10, 2021
"If you don’t invest in retention, you get the leaky bucket syndrome where diverse talent keeps leaving."
Anna Avrekh Amy Jiménez Márquez Morgan C. Ramsey Catarina TsangDiversity In and For Design: Building Conscious Diversity in Design and Research
June 9, 2021
"Moving research upstream in the product process helps solve problems faster and save millions of dollars."
George Zhang Molly StevensUX Research Excellence Framework
March 11, 2021
"Too often research lives in silos, making it hard to connect the dots across streams."
Jake BurghardtStop wasting research: Unlock more value from research insights
June 24, 2025
"We should feel empowered to propose research initiatives that stakeholders aren’t explicitly asking for."
Joanna Vodopivec Prabhas PokharelOne Research Team for All - Influence Without Authority
March 9, 2022
"Having a subject matter expert act as a dot connector across research studies greatly improves insight reuse."
Iulia CornigeanuQuantQual Book Club: Small Data
March 8, 2024
"A picture is worth a thousand words; a text vision statement often makes everyone think differently."
Satyam KantamneniDo You Have an Experience Vision?
March 23, 2023
"Start small to make a big impact by building one advocate relationship and then replicating the success."
Louis Rosenfeld Jose Coronado Rachel Posman Guneet Singh Crystal YanThe Bigger Picture: A Panel Discussion
October 23, 2019
"You would never implement an algorithm on a doctor without speaking to them, but in hospitality, it’s done to workers all the time."
Jodi ForlizziDesign and AI innovation
June 5, 2024
