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
Kate Towsey
Participant Recruitment and Management Tools
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Conference
Christopher Taylor Edwards
Design as a Team Practice, A Practical Guide to Cross-functional Collaboration
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Brad Orego
Bringing Customer Research to More Internal Teams
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Caroline Vize
The State of UX: Five Lessons from 2021 to Accelerate Digital Experience in 2022
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Steve Portigal
Discussion
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Corey Nelson
Layoffs
2022 • Advancing Research Community
Tricia Wang
Spatial Collapse: Designing for Emergent Culture
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Lisa Gironda
Opener: Chief of Staff–An unexpected journey
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Theresa Slate
Why Changing Hearts & Minds Doesn’t Work When Promoting DE&I Efforts, but Checklists Do
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Lisa Spitz
Building Trust Through Equitable Research Practices
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Mujtaba Hameed
The new horizon of ethnography: using AI to unlock the full potential of in-person research
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Conference
Mark Boulton
Ops without Designers
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Jose Coronado
From Zero to Hero
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Megan Blocker
Day 2 Theme Panel
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Peter Boersma
How to Define and Maintain a DesignOps Roadmap
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold

More Videos

Dan Donald

"Everyone seems to have a design system, but many don’t understand why they need one."

Dan Donald

Design Systems as a Vehicle for Systemic Change

June 1, 2023

Barb Spanton

"The scoping of Canada’s COVID app protected people with new phones, but left vulnerable populations unserved."

Barb Spanton

Doing Work That Matters: A Look Beyond The Idealistic Notion of 'Doing Meaningful Work'

June 10, 2022

Laura Smith

"A viable service is one that not only functions well but can also develop, grow, and flourish."

Laura Smith Tom Gayler

Embedding Service Design and Agile Practice within UK Planning Teams to Create Services that Last

December 3, 2024

Marjorie Stainback

"After this program, we saw a shift from only 15% strategic research to 56%."

Marjorie Stainback Kelsey Kingman

Transforming Strategic Research Capacity through Democratization

October 24, 2019

Victor Lombardi

"The maps lose scientific accuracy but gain understanding by simplifying complex data into color keys that people interpret quickly."

Victor Lombardi Ted Booth HK Dunston Andrew Otwell

Bridging Design and Climate Science

February 14, 2024

Jennifer Bolduc

"Covid proved people can work from anywhere, the real challenge is trust and managing that well."

Jennifer Bolduc Diane Gregorio Emily Day

What's involved with getting people back to work?: A panel discussion

July 1, 2021

Dane DeSutter

"Gesture and embodied actions will be a key tool for understanding user experience as computing moves beyond traditional screen-based interactions."

Dane DeSutter

Keeping the Body in Mind: What Gestures and Embodied Actions Tell You That Users May Not

March 26, 2024

Julie Baher

"When I first got to Citrix, people didn’t even know we had a design team."

Julie Baher

Culture Change—My Journey

May 14, 2015

Kate Stern

"The metaverse is the successor to the mobile internet, and we’re only at the dial-up stage of its development."

Kate Stern

Scaling Learning for the Future

September 9, 2022