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."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"We document everything from product specs to implementation and design specs to prevent knowledge silos."
Ana FerreiraDesigning Distributed: Leading Doist’s Fully Remote Design Team in Six Countries
January 8, 2024
"Bad recruitment equals bad insights, and there’s little you can do to fix it during the session."
Taiye Akin-AkinyosoyeAmplifying voices and enhancing user research through group interviews
March 12, 2025
"Enterprise UX is fraught with ambiguity, complexity, and a lot of people who may be skeptical, cynical, or apathetic."
Uday GajendarThe Wicked Craft of Enterprise UX
May 13, 2015
"Building skepticism into users is essential because if you’re not skeptical as a designer, it’s hard to build it into your customers."
Helen ArmstrongAugment the Human. Interrogate the System.
June 7, 2023
"Users creatively circumvent broken enterprise systems, which traditional metrics often miss."
Alexandra SchmidtEnterprise UX Playbook
December 1, 2022
"The four stretches of product leadership are managing up, down, sideways, and outwards."
Wendy JohanssonBe a Product Boss!
December 6, 2022
"Constraints during ideation sessions help avoid endlessly blue-sky thinking and keep ideas focused."
Billy CarlsonIdeation tips for Product Managers
December 6, 2022
"Principles give unity and organization to a product, system, or human experience, not just guidelines or rules of thumb."
Richard BuchananCreativity and Principles in the Flourishing Enterprise
June 15, 2018
"There is no singular solution in systems thinking; there are multiple types of interventions."
Sheryl CababaLiving in the Clouds: Adopting a Systems Thinking Mindset
June 6, 2023
