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
"Design ops is servant leadership — if everything goes well, no one notices, but if it goes poorly, we are the first to be blamed."
Maggie DieringerCutting through the Noise
September 24, 2020
"It costs about as much as a bottle of water in energy to generate a single email from an LLM system."
Aras BilgenWho does the math: A designer’s journey in building an AI-based tutoring app
June 10, 2025
"Capabilities are the skills, mindsets, and professional abilities that underlie practices and then inform roles."
Peter MerholzThe Mysterious Case of the Missing UX Career Path
August 25, 2022
"Sponsor sessions are free, not sales pitches, and do not overlap with the main program so anyone can attend."
Louis Rosenfeld Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
November 16, 2022
"Only the pavement can teach you how to skate. You can’t just explain authenticity; people have to feel it."
Miles OrkinCreativity and Culture
November 8, 2018
"Apple solved the problem of making touchscreens accessible by inventing VoiceOver and providing rich APIs for developers."
Sam ProulxTo Boldly Go: The New Frontiers of Accessibility
September 9, 2022
"There’s no need to take notes. All session materials and videos will be shared quickly after presentations."
Bria Alexander Louis RosenfeldWelcome
September 8, 2022
"The best researchers are multi-method and they have five tools, with prompt engineering as the fifth emerging one."
Savina HawkinsHarnessing AI in UXR: Practical Strategies for Positive Impact
March 26, 2024
"Some of these talks might make people feel a little uncomfortable because we haven’t had these conversations before."
Saara Kamppari-MillerTheme Three Intro
September 9, 2022
