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
Catt Small
Craft a Vision that Actually Gets Shipped
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Kevin Bethune
Reimagining Design: Unlocking Strategic Innovation
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Sam Proulx
SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Dave Gray
Group Activity: Making Sense of DesignOps
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Dr Chloe Sharp
Using Evidence and Collaboration for Setting and Defending Priorities
2023 • Design in Product 2023
Gold
Megan Blocker
A Selectively Scrappy Approach to ResearchOps
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Smitha Papolu
Theme 3 Discussion
2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Gold
Dantley Davis
Leadership & Diversity—A Fireside Chat with Dantley Davis
2020 • Enterprise Community
Vitorio Miliano
Don’t call it AI: Turn words into numbers with quantitative ethnography
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Conference
Ross Smith
Breaking Barriers with Empathy
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Josh Clark
Sentient Design: New Design Patterns for New Experiences (3rd of 3 seminars)
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Gabriela Barneva
Operationalizing Inclusive Design in Design Ops
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Audrey Crane
Shadow Design–Where Else is Design Happening in Your Organization?
2023 • Enterprise Community
Jesse Zolna
Inviting the Whole Org to Come See For Yourself
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Eric Shumake
An AMA on UX's Role in Healthcare
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Sarah Fathallah
Beyond insights: Rethinking the role of researchers as stewards of organizational wisdom
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold

More Videos

Saara Kamppari-Miller

"Who works here anyways? I knew about immediate teams but beyond that, it was a fog."

Saara Kamppari-Miller

Cartography for Design Communities

September 10, 2025

Indra Klavins

"Quarterly retros are sacred; what happens in retro stays in retro to create trust and honest conversations."

Indra Klavins

A Design Ops Girl in a Dev Ops World

October 23, 2019

Christopher Geison

"Researchers must be shapers of AI technology and not simply users of it."

Christopher Geison

Theme 1 Intro

March 25, 2024

Rachel Radway

"Start with quick wins, show value, and communicate loudly to get buy-in for more design ops capacity."

Rachel Radway Katie Bingham Joe Wiertel

The Many Paths Of Design Operations

September 8, 2022

Llewyn Paine

"The choices we make about AI are about much more than speed versus quality — they define how we value research and our relationships."

Llewyn Paine

Coexisting with AI: A practical guide for researchers to navigate tools, ethics, and integration

March 11, 2025

Dan Saffer

"Don Norman was named the top accomplished woman in UX by AI, even though Don is a man."

Dan Saffer

Why AI projects fail (and what we can do about it)

May 14, 2025

Marisa Bernstein

"If it doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t work."

Marisa Bernstein

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

December 9, 2021

Megan Clegg

"Compliance is not enough; we need to go beyond minimum legal requirements for true accessibility."

Megan Clegg Michael Haggerty-Villa Alexis Morin

Space for Everyone: Reframing Accessibility Through a Wider Lens

June 10, 2021

Miles Orkin

"Enterprise is not a noun or a verb; you don’t say, I’m an enter-priser. That needs to be changed."

Miles Orkin

Creativity and Culture

November 8, 2018