Rosenverse
Customer-Centered Design Organizations

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
Ignacio Martinez
Fair and Effective Designer Evaluation
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Reginé Gilbert
Asking the Right Questions: Life, Hope and Moving Forward During the Pandemic
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Dane DeSutter
Keeping the Body in Mind: What Gestures and Embodied Actions Tell You That Users May Not
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
John Calhoun
Meters, Miles, and Madness: New Frameworks to Measure the (Elusive) Value of DesignOps
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Rachael Dietkus, LCSW
Leading through the long tail of trauma
2022 • Enterprise Community
Brendan Jarvis
It was the Best of Times. It was the Worst of Times.
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Connect with the Advancing Research Community
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold
Corey Long
Hiring in DesignOps: A Critical Study on How to Hire and Get Hired
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Billy Carlson
Pro-level UI Tips for Beginners
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Kayla Farrell
What It's Like To Be a User Researcher at Compass
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Amy Marquez
INVEST: Discussion
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Jenny Price
From Tradition to Transformation: Unlocking Startup Agility in a Legacy Enterprise
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Heidi Trost
To Protect People, You Have to Protect Information: A Human-Centered Design Approach to Cybersecurity
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Louis Rosenfeld
Day 1 Welcome
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Chris Hodowanec
Agile + User Experience: How to navigate the Agile landscape as an UX Practitioner
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Stefanie Owens
Optimizing for Outcomes: Transformation Design in Systems at Scale
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold

More Videos

Tutti Taygerly

"Multitasking is a myth. You can’t listen and do emails at the same time effectively."

Tutti Taygerly

Videconference: How to Work with Difficult People with Tutti Taygerly

June 25, 2020

Christian Rohrer

"Designers thrive on qualitative research because it gives them access to the root of the problem beyond just numbers."

Christian Rohrer

Research Operations at Scale

November 7, 2017

Bria Alexander

"The stories you’re gonna hear today really reflect the world we live in, design operations, and resilience."

Bria Alexander

Theme 1 Intro

September 23, 2024

Michael Land

"We’re trying to build a design operations role that balances top-down governance with bottom-up community building."

Michael Land

Establishing Design Operations in Government

February 18, 2021

Peter Van Dijck

"Model companies are students in a classroom wanting good points—they’re happy to run external expert evals to improve."

Peter Van Dijck

Hands-on AI #2: Understanding evals: LLM as a Judge

October 15, 2025

Steve Chaparro

"Simplicity rarely loses to complexity in the public square—it’s about meeting people where they are."

Steve Chaparro

Bringing Into Alignment Brand, Culture and Space

August 13, 2020

Alla Weinberg

"Psychological safety can be created or rebuilt very quickly with intentional team exercises."

Alla Weinberg

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

September 8, 2022

Dave Malouf

"We haven't done a good job of coalescing all those different types of experiences together to create a practice around what Design Ops really is."

Dave Malouf Meredith Black Farid Sabitov

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

February 17, 2022

Magdalena Zadara

"We treated user research and journey mapping as non-negotiable basics, even when pressured for rapid delivery."

Magdalena Zadara

Zero Hour: How to Get Far Quickly When Starting Your Digital Service Unit Late

November 16, 2022