Customer-Centered Design Organizations
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
"Embracing uncertainty means diving in without knowing the outcome and creating something new every time."
Jim KalbachJazz Improvisation as a Model for Team Collaboration
November 6, 2017
"You want someone who writes with equal parts empathy and authority, not just pure authority."
Louis RosenfeldCoffee with Lou: Should You Write a (UX) Book?
March 7, 2024
"Levels can mean really different things at different companies, so ask a lot of questions about expectations for each level."
Catt Small Micah Bennett Brian Carr Jessica HarlleeWhat's Next for ICs: Exploring Staff and Principal Designer Roles
February 22, 2024
"Finding out more about these most active users is a key priority this year, said our CEO at the board presentation."
Marieke McCloskeyUser Science: Product Analytics & User Research
March 11, 2021
"Wonder Studio automatically segments actors, maps their movements to a 3D model, and renders a synthetic avatar video."
Llewyn Paine[Demo] Deploying AI doppelgangers to de-identify user research recordings
June 5, 2024
"You don’t want to overdesign just to make something more data interpretable because that can lead you down a dark path."
Joshua NobleCasual Inference
October 6, 2023
"Storytelling helps gain people’s attention, build empathy, and improve understanding and recall of key points."
Sara LogelYour Colleagues are Your Users Too
March 29, 2023
"Sponsor sessions may require registration by email to prevent Zoom bombings and protect session integrity."
Bria Alexander Louis RosenfeldWelcome
January 8, 2024
"Consistency is so important that sometimes even consistency in failure works if it means I only have to learn the workaround once."
Sam ProulxOnline Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
June 7, 2023
