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
"You need to be laser-focused as ops people—we get asked to do too many things otherwise."
Briana Thomas Christina RodriguezWhen Design Ops Comes in H.O.T. : A Tale of a Transformed Design Org
September 30, 2021
"We want everyone adopting these inclusive design and research practices—not just a few advanced teams."
Saara Kamppari-MillerInclusive Design is DesignOps
September 29, 2021
"Carbon is just the starting point for what can be imagined. We're hired for our expertise to adapt, not just follow directions."
Mitchell BernsteinOrganizing Chaos: How IBM is Defining Design Systems with Sketch for an Ever-Changing AI Landscape
September 29, 2021
"We call everybody a designer on purpose to encourage branching out across disciplines."
Adam CutlerPeople + Places + Practices = Outcomes
June 8, 2016
"Empathy applies to us too—we needed to understand how our own people were feeling about these layered changes."
Erin HauberDesign is Not the Frosting on the Scaled Agile Layer Cake
October 24, 2019
"The proof came from delivering the output — stakeholders stopped questioning the process once they saw the quality research."
Catherine BlizzardUsing Integrated Insight to Drive Growth
March 10, 2022
"Generally everyone is just cutting right through because that’s the fastest route."
Marc Majers Tony TurnerInterrupted UX - Add A Dose of Reality To Usability Testing
March 11, 2022
"If participants want us to delete a video, we’re going to delete their video, even if legally we don’t have to."
Theresa MarwahHow Atlassian is Operationalizing Respect in Research
February 27, 2020
"We’ll explore tactics to understand systems, points of intervention, and how to redirect power."
Ariel KennanTheme 2 Intro
December 9, 2021
