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
Louis Rosenfeld
How AI will Change DesignOps Tooling
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Megan Nipe
Human-Centered Design for Engagement: Maturing from Newsletterville to Personalized, One-to-One Messaging
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Taylor Jennings
Repository Retrospective: Learnings from Introducing a Central Place for UX Research
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Dan Mall
“Ask Me Anything” with Dan Mall, Author of Upcoming Rosenfeld Title, Design that Scales
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Kristin Skinner
8 Types of Measures in Design Operations
2020 • DesignOps Community
Dave Malouf
Panel: Design Systems and Documentation
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Patrizia Bertini
DesignOps + KPIs = Measure your Impact!
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Alla Weinberg
Cross-Functional Relationship Design
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Cassini Nazir
The Dangers of Empathy: Toward More Responsible Design Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Matt Bernius
Trauma-informed Research: A Panel Discussion
2021 • Advancing Research Community
Bill Scott
Lean Engineering: Engineering for Learning and Experimentation in the Enterprise
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Tina Weisser
When AI Agents Meet Reality. Service Design Lessons from a Pilot
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Sheryl Cababa
Thinking in systems to address climate with Sheryl Cababa
2024 • Climate UX Interest Group
Ricardo Martins
Unlocking the power of advanced quantitative methods
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Dan Ward
Failure Friday #1 with Dan Ward
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Dan Willis
Filling the Void
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold

More Videos

Sam Proulx

"If you want to understand the actual experience, you need a native assistive technology user involved."

Sam Proulx

Understanding Screen Readers on Mobile: How And Why to Learn from Native Users

March 27, 2023

Dan Hill

"Strategic is what you do when you don’t know what to do, when there’s nothing to do."

Dan Hill

Strategic design, slowdown, and the infrastructures of everyday life

April 21, 2022

Malini Rao

"We neglected our power users during the responsive, one-size-fits-all strategy, and it really hurt us."

Malini Rao

Lessons Learned from a 4-year Product Re-platforming Journey

June 9, 2021

Dave Malouf

"There aren't learned enough experts; we are still in that nebula trying to figure out how to become a star."

Dave Malouf Meredith Black Farid Sabitov

The Past, Present, and Future of DesignOps: a 2-part DesignOps Community Call (Part 1)

February 17, 2022

Laura Gatewood

"The words we use should enable clear paths of understanding so recipients know their role, what to do next, and why both easily and quickly."

Laura Gatewood Laine Prokay

Beyond Buzzwords: Adding Heart to Effective Slack Communication

September 23, 2024

Bethany Brown

"I spent 40% of my day verifying what the system already knows."

Bethany Brown

Rewiring operations with service design and AI

November 20, 2025

Alla Weinberg

"When we’re mobilized or immobilized, our IQ literally drops by half and our peripheral vision narrows."

Alla Weinberg

Design Teams Need Psychological Safety: Here’s How to Create It

September 8, 2022

Chris Hammond

"Don’t be an other means embedding sustainability into how your company already works, rather than starting from scratch."

Chris Hammond

Embedding sustainability into enterprise design and development: A journey towards "sustainability consciousness"

April 2, 2025

Tiffany Cheng

"When push comes to shove, think about the human need. Are they able to do that with an imperfect but usable product?"

Tiffany Cheng

Designing in a Pandemic: Integrating Speed and Rigor

June 9, 2022