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
"In our product, no manager can see more data than any designer; transparency is our red line."
Matteo GrattonCan Data and Ethics Live Together?
October 1, 2021
"Algorithms that adjust care based on race don’t actually help and embed disparities instead."
Dr. Jamika D. BurgeBroad Strokes: Connecting Design, Research, and AI to the World Around Us
June 7, 2023
"At Bloomberg, we designed for our clients but also for our colleagues across these two groups."
Louis RosenfeldFounder’s Welcome
December 6, 2022
"False information spreads significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, often by an order of magnitude."
Mandy DrewWhat Role(s) Can Research Play in Responsible Design?
March 11, 2021
"After redesign, the bank’s application ease of use improved, task success went up, and time on task dropped by a full minute."
Dana Bishop2022: The Year UX Demonstrates its Business Impact
March 11, 2022
"Community is not a monolith; we must engage a broad intersection of voices, not just one perspective."
Amy Paris Danielle ThierryDelivering Equity: Government Services for All Ages, Languages, Sexual Orientations, and Gender Identities
December 9, 2021
"Design the chair inside the room inside the house inside the city plan — see those as connected nested things."
Dan HillStrategic design, slowdown, and the infrastructures of everyday life
April 21, 2022
"You must remember this. A kiss is just a kiss. A sigh is just a sigh."
Susan Simon-DanielsWar Stories LIVE! Susan Simon-Daniels
March 30, 2020
"Showing several concepts side by side and forcing choices yields better discrimination than rating scales."
Michaela MoraAdvanced Concept Testing Approaches To Guide Product Development and Business Decisions
March 11, 2022
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
What are effective ways to include people with disabilities in generative and usability research?
In what ways did mindfulness and Reiki practice help Mary Lynn reassess her relationship with corporate UX work?
How can designers identify which parts of a system they can influence or should monitor using affordance mapping?