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
Sam Proulx
SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Fisayo Osilaja
[Demo] The AI edge: From researcher to strategist
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
George Abraham
Design Systems To-Go: Indigo.Design Overview and Exploring the Developer Workflow (Part 3)
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Hugh Dubberly
Problems with Problems: Reconsidering the Frame of Designing as Problem-Solving
2019 • Enterprise Community
Maish Nichani
Sparking a Service Excellence Mindset at a Government Agency
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Alla Weinberg
People Are Sick of Change: Psychological Safety is the Cure
2023 • DesignOps Community
Susan Weinschenk
Evaluating the Maturity of UX in Your Organization
2020 • Enterprise Community
Jemma Ahmed
Collaboration: learning from other fields beyond our own [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2024 • Advancing Research Community
Erin Hoffman-John
This Game is Never Done: Design Leadership Techniques from the Video Game World
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Marissa Cui
Climate Design Product Showcase
2024 • Climate UX Interest Group
Scott Plewes
Why Isn't Your UX Approach Going Viral?: A Mathematical Model
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Peter Merholz
Customer-Centered Design Organizations
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Sheryl Cababa
Expanding your Design Lens with Systems Thinking
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Jon Fukuda
All the Ops: Successful cross-functional collaboration
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Natalia Radywyl
Co-Designing New Power in Australia's Public Sector
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Jacqui Frey
Flow and Superfluidity for Design Orgs
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold

More Videos

Christopher Taylor Edwards

"Pairing isn't about taking away jobs; it's about amplifying everyone's expertise and breaking down hierarchy."

Christopher Taylor Edwards Valerie Roske

Design as a Team Practice, A Practical Guide to Cross-functional Collaboration

September 30, 2021

Nathan Curtis

"If your organization is healthy, the haters pretty quickly get marginalized."

Nathan Curtis Nalini P. Kotamraju Jack Moffett Dawn Ressel

Discussion

June 9, 2016

Elana Chapman

"Wizard of Oz testing involves someone pretending to be a screen reader by reading content and roles out loud."

Elana Chapman Li Wen Huang Divyen Sanganee Annabel Weiner

Getting started with accessibility research

February 20, 2025

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

Briana Thomas

"Our team mission was to accelerate learning and productization of AI and ML technologies in digital imaging."

Briana Thomas

The Quiet Force: Uncovering Hidden Leadership in High-Impact Design Teams

September 24, 2024

Erin Malone

"AI is very biased. We have a lot of work to do to get the bias out before going further with many systems."

Erin Malone

Understanding the past to prepare for the future

July 19, 2024

Sam Ladner

"You have to be careful not to be too weird; mental models differ internationally."

Sam Ladner

How Research Can Drive Strategic Foresight

March 9, 2022

Craig Brookes

"Collaboration without ego is key to building the right product, not just what one's own interests are."

Craig Brookes Andreas Huebner Morgan Quinn

"Just Make it Look Good" and Other Ways We're Misunderstood

June 11, 2021

Prerna Makanawala

"When things behave the same way, users don’t have to worry about what will happen—that’s the intuitive factor."

Prerna Makanawala

Achieving Balanced Design Consistency

June 9, 2021