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
Ivana Ng
Level Up Your Program with ProductOps
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Ned Dwyer
The Intersection of Design and ResearchOps
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Trisha Terhar
Empathizing with the Empowered: Non-Researcher Responses to Democratization
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Yasmine Khan
Checking Bias and Listening to Financially Vulnerable Americans
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
GenAI for UXers: A Rosenbot Demo and Discussion
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Gonzalo Goyanes
Design ROI: Cover a Little, Get a Lot
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Marc Fonteijn
First Insights from the 2025 Service Design Salary(+) Report
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
Peter Boersma
How to Define and Maintain a DesignOps Roadmap
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Alnie Figueroa
Teamwork: Strategies for Effective Collaboration with Other Program Management Teams
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Dr. Nikki Smith
Research Strategy: Connecting Insights to Outcomes
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Jemma Ahmed
Bringing together market and user research
2019 • Advancing Research Community
Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi
Contextuality problem: Exploring the Benefits of Qualitative and Quantitative Research
2023 • QuantQual Interest Group
Landon Barnes
Are My Research Findings Actually Meaningful?
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Emily Danielson
“I mean, I can lift a shovel”: Design Skills in Disaster Response
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Rusha Sopariwala
Remote, Together: Craft and Collaboration Across Disciplines, Borders, Time Zones, and a Design Org of 170+
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Denise Jacobs
Interactive Keynote: Social Change by Design
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold

More Videos

Paula Bach

"From 1995 to 2012, Windows users had a consistent start button habit path to reach settings; Windows 8 broke that 15-year habit."

Paula Bach

Improving Legacy Software: How Much Better Does it Have to Be?

March 11, 2022

Jen van der Meer

"All of our models and metrics are temporary scripts. What matters is the rehearsal and how we keep rewriting the score together."

Jen van der Meer

Service design performs value

November 19, 2025

Bria Alexander

"If you ever feel unsupported or unsafe, please let us know. It is our priority to make sure you feel protected and supported."

Bria Alexander

Opening Remarks

June 11, 2021

Tricia Wang

"You need to build credibility. It's not enough to just state a problem, you have to show you'll do the work and push for it."

Tricia Wang

SCALE: Discussion

June 15, 2018

Audrey Crane

"The most alarming result is that people didn’t know how to work with the design team or get help from them."

Audrey Crane

Shadow Design–Where Else is Design Happening in Your Organization?

April 20, 2023

Louis Rosenfeld

"The Rosen Bot is narrow in scope, just UX and product design content that's super high quality."

Louis Rosenfeld

GenAI for UXers: A Rosenbot Demo and Discussion

June 11, 2025

Sam Proulx

"Every piece of assistive technology is highly customized for the individual, so labs often fail to replicate users’ ideal setups."

Sam Proulx

SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population

September 29, 2021

Jilanna Wilson

"Continuous onboarding is like drinking water in sips throughout the day, not a gallon all at once."

Jilanna Wilson

Distributed Design Operations Management

October 23, 2019

Bria Alexander

"We are back and we are right on time. Eight o'clock on the dot."

Bria Alexander

Day 3 Welcome

September 25, 2024