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
Christian Crumlish
Introduction by our Conference Chair
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Indi Young
Thinking styles: Mend hidden cracks in your market
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Jorge Arango
[Demo] How to re-categorize content at scale using LLMs
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Dan Willis
Enterprise Storytelling Sessions
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Alnie Figueroa
Teamwork: Strategies for Effective Collaboration with Other Program Management Teams
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Paul Pangaro, PhD
Systems Disciplines: Table Stakes for 21st Century Organizations
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Bria Alexander
The Big Question about Resilience: A panel discussion
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Billy Carlson
Pro-level UI Tips for Beginners
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Aditi Ruiz
A PM State of Mind: Empathy Mapping Your Product Manager, Pt. 1
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Andrew Webster
Scaling Design Capability: How Involved Should You Be?
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Marc Rettig
The Urge to Migrate
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Sohit Karol
Designing Delightful Listening Experiences: Mixed Methods Research in the Age of Machine Learning
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Reginé Gilbert
Asking the Right Questions: Life, Hope and Moving Forward During the Pandemic
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Jon Fukuda
Storytelling for DesignOps
2023 • DesignOps Community
Rachael Dietkus, LCSW
Leading through the long tail of trauma
2022 • Enterprise Community
Mike Oren
Design Research Strategy & Strategic Design Research
2022 • Advancing Research Community

More Videos

Dave Malouf

"Without real business world experience, most leaders struggle with the overwhelming amount of demands placed on them."

Dave Malouf Adrienne Allnutt Jon Fukuda Dominique Ward

The Future of DesignOps

January 8, 2024

Abbey Smalley

"We focused on consolidating frameworks and landed on Canvas, which now supports 45 teams and growing."

Abbey Smalley Sylas Souza

Scaling UX Past the Size of Your Team

January 8, 2024

Amber Knabl

"85% of Netflix users opt for captions, showing how accessibility features benefit everyone, not just those with disabilities."

Amber Knabl

Empowering innovation: The critical role of inclusive product development in the AI era

June 4, 2024

Leisa Reichelt

"Ratios always start on the premise of spreading people too thin, which is not a great way to get success."

Leisa Reichelt

Opening Keynote: Operating in Context

November 7, 2018

Sahibzada Mayed

"In corporate settings you have to get buy-in for care—it’s strange to think about, but that’s part of decentralizing power."

Sahibzada Mayed Lauren Lin

Cultivating Design Ecologies of Care, Community, and Collaboration

October 4, 2023

Sam Proulx

"If a dialog pops up but the keyboard focus isn’t moved into it, a screen reader user might not know it’s there."

Sam Proulx

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Screen Readers

June 11, 2021

Andy Polaine

"All of these things are connected and when they become too disconnected, it’s problematic."

Andy Polaine Lavrans Løvlie

What is the role of service design in product-led organizations?

December 3, 2024

Nalini P. Kotamraju

"We built living components as conversation starters, showing instead of telling."

Nalini P. Kotamraju

An Organizational Story: Salesforce Lightning Design System

June 9, 2016

Sha Hwang

"We can damage relationships or apply tactics appropriate for protest environments when co-creation was necessary."

Sha Hwang

The First Fifty Years of Civic Design

November 16, 2022