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
Rachael Dietkus, LCSW
Everything You Need to Know about the Civic Design 2022 Call for Presentations
2022 • Civic Design Community
Nalini Kotamraju
Research After UX
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Victor Udoewa
Research in the Pluriverse
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Meghan Bausone
Systems Thinking and Design Innovation: Working with Leverage Points in Rural Maternal Health Systems
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Indi Young
Paying Better Attention to the Problem with Indi Young
2019 • Advancing Research Community
Ricardo Martins
Unlocking the power of advanced quantitative methods
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Chelsey Glasson
Exit Interview #3: Same as It Ever Was: What Leaving Tech Taught Me About Change
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Kim Fellman Cohen
Measuring the Designer Experience
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Indra Klavins
A Design Ops Girl in a Dev Ops World
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Alan Williams
Designing essential financial services for those in need
2022 • Civic Design Community
Yoel Sumitro
Actions and Reflections: Bridging the Skills Gap among Researchers
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Alexandra Schmidt
Enterprise UX Playbook
2022 • Enterprise Community
Courtney Maya George
Scale Your Organization and Grow Your Designers
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Jemma Ahmed
Bridge Building across Research Disciplines
2021 • Advancing Research Community
Peter Van Dijck
Hands-on AI #1: Let’s write your first AI eval
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Matt Bernius
Learnings from Applying Trauma-Informed Principles to the Research Process
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold

More Videos

Uday Gajendar

"Designing at scale means handling millions of users and dozens of geographies with all their unique challenges."

Uday Gajendar

Theme 1: Introduction

June 9, 2021

Chloe Amos-Edkins

"We have this collective superpower navigating the breadth and depth of human experience across cultures."

Chloe Amos-Edkins

A Cultural Approach: Research in the Context of Glocalisation

March 27, 2023

Sara Conklin

"If you’re not questioning your place in UX right now, you’re sleeping."

Sara Conklin

Exit Interview: 20 Years of Tech, One Very Big Bet, and a Lot of Heat Pumps

April 10, 2026

Christian Rohrer

"Field studies are the most powerful qualitative method available — nothing else compares for real-world insight."

Christian Rohrer

Insight Types That Influence Enterprise Decision Makers

May 13, 2015

Megan Campos

"Demographic criteria is generally considered less important compared to project-specific or contextual criteria in recruitment."

Megan Campos

What Did I Miss? The Hidden Costs of Deprioritizing Diversity in User Research

March 12, 2021

Iram Shah

"I may be ruining his experience because I’m forgetting it’s his experience, not mine."

Iram Shah

Closing Keynote: The View from the Top

June 4, 2019

Adam Cutler

"In remote teams, we get prototypes up in front of folks in a short time window for collaborative comments."

Adam Cutler Karen Pascoe Ian Swinson Susan Worthman

Discussion

June 8, 2016

Heidi Trost

"If users have to look things up, they often won’t, so policies must be easy and fast to respond to."

Heidi Trost

To Protect People, You Have to Protect Information: A Human-Centered Design Approach to Cybersecurity

January 23, 2025

Nicole Aleong

"We need to think of ourselves as strategic leaders who know customer needs better than anyone in the organization."

Nicole Aleong Michaela Mora Prayag Narula Brianna Sylver

What UX research can learn from other research practices [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]

September 14, 2023