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
"Always design your high-impact slides for the busy executive in the back of a limo."
Mujtaba HameedFrameworks for Excellence: Using Visual Thinking and Communication to Elevate Your Research
March 26, 2024
"The current design education system doesn't always prepare designers for the complexity of enterprise challenges."
Alexandra SchmidtEnterprise UX Playbook
December 1, 2022
"We humanize metrics by adding the people element, measuring success not just by numbers but by happiness."
Changying (Z) ZhengNavigating Innovation with Integrity
September 25, 2024
"Can you show me your thought process? That’s really critical as the ability to articulate themselves."
Adam Cutler Karen Pascoe Ian Swinson Susan WorthmanDiscussion
June 8, 2016
"Only people who work intimately in a space can effectively map that space; outsiders cannot produce useful strategy maps."
Simon WardleyMaps and Topographical Intelligence
January 31, 2019
"Providing alternative content is often a kinder gesture than any lengthy alternative text could be."
Abby CovertStuck? Diagrams Help
October 27, 2022
"Trust is earned incrementally by responding to people's needs over and over in a variety of contexts."
Ed MullenDesigning the Unseen: Enabling Institutions to Build Public Trust
November 16, 2022
"Learning prompt engineering will make us better researchers in the same way coding helped designers."
Dr. Jamika D. Burge Nick Fine Alexandra Jayeun Lee Greg Nudelman Bo WangHow UX researchers can partner with (and not be replaced by) AI [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
August 31, 2023
"It was not some benevolent church group or a member of a Town Council that carved out these curb Cuts. They were due to deliberate actions and painstaking labor of members in the community."
Sha HwangThe First Fifty Years of Civic Design
November 16, 2022
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
What metadata should be included in research reports to support future search and AI interrogation?
What are the current limitations of AI regarding research context and participant environment observations?
How does Survicate's use of AI-powered prototypes relate to the Wizard of Oz research method?