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
Cheryl Platz
Merging Improv with Design
2019 • Enterprise Community
Anna Avrekh
User Research, Design, and Product - A Love Story
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Farid Sabitov
Theme Four Intro
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Jemma Ahmed
Theme 2 Intro
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Dan Willis
Enterprise Storytelling Sessions
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Amahra Spence
Designing for Liberation, Rehearsing Freedom
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Kit Unger
Theme 3 Intro
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Vincent Brathwaite
Opener: Past, Present, and Future—Closing the Racial Divide in Design Teams
2020 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Jemma Ahmed
Research at an inflection point: Adapting to a new era of collaboration, equity, and innovation
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Marc Fonteijn
First Insights from the 2025 Service Design Salary(+) Report
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
Jorge Arango
AI as Thought Partner: How to Use LLMs to Transform Your Notes (3rd of 3 seminars)
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Jemma Ahmed
Collaboration: learning from other fields beyond our own [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2024 • Advancing Research Community
Alla Weinberg
Design Teams Need Psychological Safety: Here’s How to Create It
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Heidi Trost
When AI Becomes the User’s Point Person—and Point of Failure
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Prayag Narula
HCI 2.0: Humanity Deserves the Attention that UX Research has to Offer
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Alison Rand
Scaling Impact with Service Design
2021 • DesignOps Community

More Videos

Victor M. Gonzalez

"We emphasize collaboration, not individual work, to build teams and collective knowledge."

Victor M. Gonzalez

Practicing Learners and Learning Practitioners

March 10, 2021

Alberto Ferreira

"We use sentiment analysis on verbatims to quantify positive, neutral, and negative customer feedback over time."

Alberto Ferreira

Making it Count: Developing a custom digital metric framework that works

October 15, 2021

Kit Unger

"Design teams often don’t have enough people to support everything being asked of them."

Kit Unger

Theme 2: Introduction

June 10, 2021

Dr. Jamika D. Burge

"Hearing a participant say thank you for listening is one of the most powerful indicators of meaningful research."

Dr. Jamika D. Burge Mansi Gupta

Advancing the Inclusion of Womxn in Research Practices

September 15, 2022

Milan Guenther

"The challenge is co-developing a custom investment model that alters decision making based on portfolio logic rather than project-based thinking."

Milan Guenther Benjamin Kumpf

The $212 billion ‘so what?’: unlocking impact in development cooperation

November 20, 2025

John Calhoun

"DPM loneliness and siloing happen because of wearing too many hats and inheriting mismatched responsibilities."

John Calhoun Rachel Posman

Two Sides of the DesignOps Coin: Teams Ops and Product Ops

January 8, 2024

James Rampton

"Rivian never allowed Apple CarPlay or Android Auto because they want to own the experience and data."

James Rampton

The Basics of Automotive UX & Why Phones Are a Part of That Future

July 25, 2024

Amanda Kaleta-Kott

"Nearly 45% of seniors 65 and older don’t have wired internet at home, so don’t rely solely on online research."

Amanda Kaleta-Kott Lea Martin, PhD

The Joys and Dilemmas of Conducting UX Research with Older Adults

March 11, 2022

Sam Proulx

"Consistency means the same interactions always do the same things; buttons are in the same place, and flows don’t change suddenly."

Sam Proulx

Online Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience

November 29, 2023