Rosenverse
Customer-Centered Design Organizations

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
Alexis Lucio
Scaling Accessibility Through Design Systems
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Yulya Besplemennova
[Demo] Stress-testing GenAI in user research synthesis
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Uday Gajendar
Leading through the long tail of trauma
2022 • Advancing Research Community
Nathan Shedroff
Double Your Mileage: Use Your Research Strategically
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Cassini Nazir
The Dangers of Empathy: Toward More Responsible Design Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
John Mortimer
Panel Discussion
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
Luca Rager
Empowering Gaming at Scale: How Xbox Builds Powerful, Automated, and Distributed Design Systems with Sketch
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Ariel Kennan
Civic Design in 2022
2022 • Civic Design Community
Yasmine Khan
Checking Bias and Listening to Financially Vulnerable Americans
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Husani Oakley
Bias Towards Action: Building Teams that Build Work
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Dave Hoffer
UX Job Search AMA #2 with Joanne Weaver and Dave Hoffer
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Louis Rosenfeld
Discussion: What Operations can teach DesignOps
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Daniel Gloyd
Designing From the Inside Out: How Method Acting Can Inspire Design Research
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Crystal Philcox
The Many Faces of Operations
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Kristin Skinner
8 Types of Measures in Design Operations
2020 • DesignOps Community
Chelsey Glasson
Exit Interview #3: Same as It Ever Was: What Leaving Tech Taught Me About Change
2025 • Rosenfeld Community

More Videos

Luke Wroblewski

"Google Translate completely reinvented itself by replacing many translation systems with a single neural network capable of zero-shot translations."

Luke Wroblewski

Designing AI Applications

March 5, 2026

Sam Yen

"Introducing design gates allowed us to finally stop the shipment of bad products."

Sam Yen

Driving Organizational Change Through Design? Do more of this and less of that

June 9, 2017

Bria Alexander

"Always approach from a place of kindness and think about the experience you want people to have as the water that keeps trees bendable."

Bria Alexander Laura Gatewood Corey Long Daniel Orbach Laine Prokay Deanna Smith

The Big Question about Resilience: A panel discussion

September 23, 2024

Deirdre Hirschtritt

"Recruiting for indigenous participants via Craigslist missed the unique role community ties play, so we regrouped and connected through community organizations."

Deirdre Hirschtritt Cesar Paredes Marie Perrot

Research is Only as Good as the Relationships You Build

November 17, 2022

Etienne Fang

"Connecting strings of Christmas lights is a mental model for connecting teams’ insights without superseding their systems."

Etienne Fang

Power of Insights: Why sharing is better than silos with Uber’s Insights Platform

December 16, 2019

Marisa Bernstein

"During testing sensitive subjects, have relevant resources at the ready, like shelter beds for participants in need."

Marisa Bernstein

It Takes GRIT: Lessons from the Small, but Mighty World of Civic Usability Testing

December 9, 2021

Lisa Welchman

"We are the fix — everything online is made by people, so we can change it together."

Lisa Welchman

Cleaning Up Our Mess: Digital Governance for Designers

June 14, 2018

Jon Fukuda

"Innovation isn’t just a buzzword in design ops; it’s at the core of how we shape the future of the design practice."

Jon Fukuda

Theme 3 Intro

September 25, 2024

Nick Cochran

"A design system helped us connect developers and designers together in community."

Nick Cochran

Growing in Enterprise Design through Making Connections

June 20, 2019