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
Gabrielle Verderber
Documentation Your Team Will Actually Use
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
How to Identify and Increase your "Experience Quotient"
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Lisa Gironda
Opener: Chief of Staff–An unexpected journey
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Mandy Drew
What Role(s) Can Research Play in Responsible Design?
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Alexis Lucio
Scaling Accessibility Through Design Systems
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Patrizia Bertini
Designing Within the Lines: How the EU AI Act Can Spark Better AI Innovation
2025 • DesignOps Community
Jon Fukuda
The Big Question about Innovation: A Panel Discussion
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Johanna Kollmann
Insights-Driven Product Strategy: Get your Research to Count
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Maria Skaaden
Continuous Design: One eye on the horizon and the other on the next wave
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Yunyan Li
UX Best Practices
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Kurdin Bazaz
Culture, DIBS & Recruiting
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Russ Unger
Onboarding: The Ecosystem, not the Afterthought
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Jorge Arango
Meeting of the Waters: Designing for Successful Inorganic Growth
2021 • Enterprise Community
Sam Proulx
To Boldly Go: The New Frontiers of Accessibility
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Matt Duignan
Atomizing Research: Trend or Trap
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Saara Kamppari-Miller
"Prototype" vs "Prototype"--Breaking Down and Rebuilding Our Understanding of What We Do
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold

More Videos

Bud Caddell

"No one should compare days. That would just be something a pompous narcissist would do."

Bud Caddell

Theme 2 Intro

September 30, 2021

Emily Danielson

"Our design skills can help to create Clarity in times of Chaos."

Emily Danielson

“I mean, I can lift a shovel”: Design Skills in Disaster Response

June 9, 2022

Carol Massa

"Designers are often perceived as high risk to the business, which conflicts with healthcare’s safety-first mindset."

Carol Massa

Designing Health: Integrating Service Design, Technology, and Strategy to Transform Patient and Clinician Experiences

December 3, 2024

Jim Kalbach

"Having big ears means listening more to others than to yourself during a performance."

Jim Kalbach

Jazz Improvisation as a Model for Team Collaboration

November 6, 2017

Erin Malone

"There’s still a need for human insight to understand behavior and apply meaningful design decisions."

Erin Malone

Understanding the past to prepare for the future

July 19, 2024

Sara Conklin

"What I realized is you need to add one word to the climate Venn diagram: specific, what specific work needs doing."

Sara Conklin

A UXer’s 12-Month Journey from Climate Concern to Climate Credibility

June 26, 2025

Wyatt Hayman

"Our research operations team’s mission is to let researchers focus on research without worrying about operational details."

Wyatt Hayman

Global Research Panels

August 8, 2020

Ian Johnson

"We found patterns that product teams didn’t expect or even want to look for."

Ian Johnson

Latent Scope: Finding structure in unstructured data

June 11, 2025

Candace Myers

"Without automation, none of these tools are talking to each other, and operational overhead for your Ops and DPM teams is actually absurd."

Candace Myers

Standardizing Design at Scale

September 9, 2022