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
B. Pagels-Minor
Breaking the Tension: The Power of Enabling Your Employees to Show Up Authentically
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Sarah Barrett
AI in Real Life: Using LLMs to Turbocharge Microsoft Learn
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Florence Okoye
AfroFuturism and UX Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Maria Giudice
Empowering change: Reigniting purpose, passion and impact in research
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Kurdin Bazaz
Culture, DIBS & Recruiting
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Dan Hill
Designing for the infrastructures of everyday life
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Saara Kamppari-Miller
"Prototype" vs "Prototype"--Breaking Down and Rebuilding Our Understanding of What We Do
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Theresa Slate
Why Changing Hearts & Minds Doesn’t Work When Promoting DE&I Efforts, but Checklists Do
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Sarah Fathallah
Lessening the Research Burden on Vulnerable Communities
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Prabhas Pokharel
Order and Chaos: New Ways of Collaborating on Synthesis and Storytelling
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Etienne Fang
Power of Insights: Why sharing is better than silos with Uber’s Insights Platform
2019 • Advancing Research Community
Robin Cannon
AI means your design system can't suck anymore
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Laura Klein
Unique challenges of innovation in enterprises
2020 • Enterprise Community
Dan Willis
Enterprise Storytelling Sessions
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Pippa Lomas
Paving the Path for Neurodiversity in Design
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Alan Williams
Designing essential financial services for those in need
2022 • Civic Design Community

More Videos

Ted Neward

"Government contracts are huge but require heavy compliance and long timelines—heads we win, tails we lose little."

Ted Neward

Theme 4: Enterprise Organizational Journey

June 4, 2019

Alfred Kahn

"Sometimes the best design isn’t the best solution; you have to find a way to make it work within business constraints."

Alfred Kahn

A Seat at the Table: Making Your Team a Strategic Partner

November 29, 2023

Theresa Neil

"Healthcare technology is absolutely a growing market with tremendous opportunity."

Theresa Neil

Designing for Wellness: Specializing in Healthcare

May 22, 2024

Michaela Mora

"Testing price effects requires careful design because user behavior can be irrational when prices are shown or hidden."

Michaela Mora

Advanced Concept Testing Approaches To Guide Product Development and Business Decisions

March 11, 2022

Patrick Boehler

"Learning velocity was a far better early signal than any other metric we were traditionally trained to look for."

Patrick Boehler Madison Karas

The service shift: transforming media organizations to create real value through design

November 19, 2025

Shipra Kayan

"Our one metric that mattered was maximizing the number of VOС-tagged tickets solved – showing customer feedback made it to the roadmap."

Shipra Kayan

How we Built a VoC (Voice of the Customer) Practice at Upwork from the Ground Up

September 30, 2021

Samuel Proulx

"If distress does happen in sessions, it’s easier to talk through it using humor or a personable approach."

Samuel Proulx Laur Baek

Inclusive Research: Debunking Myths and Getting Started

March 12, 2025

Brendan Jarvis

"The challenges we face are real, but so is our capacity to respond creatively and courageously."

Brendan Jarvis

It was the Best of Times. It was the Worst of Times.

September 25, 2024

Sheryl Cababa

"Systems thinking can help us design more explicitly for resilience, as seen in distributed manufacturing of PPE during the pandemic."

Sheryl Cababa

Expanding Your Design Lens with Systems Thinking

February 23, 2023