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
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Great design alone doesn't guarantee great user experiences; strategy and organizational structure are equally essential.
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The centralized internal services model fosters a strong design community but limits strategic influence and slows delivery.
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The decentralized embedded model increases ownership but risks designer isolation, limited skill diversity, and fractured user experiences.
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Management and organizational culture changes can dramatically improve team performance, as shown by the Golden State Warriors' playoff turnaround.
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The centralized partnership model balances centralized design leadership with dedicated designer commitment to multiple feature teams, improving effectiveness and collaboration.
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Organizing teams around customer journeys or customer types rather than features reduces siloing and improves cohesive user experiences.
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A spread of design skills—content strategy, research, interaction, visual design—is crucial for comprehensive user experience design.
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Strong team leadership must manage team members' growth, cross-team relationships, and upward stakeholder communication simultaneously.
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Explicit design quality standards and principles empower teams to make bolder and more consistent design decisions.
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Saying no is a vital leadership skill to prevent overextension and maintain design quality despite resource constraints.
Notable Quotes
"If you do your job as a designer, talk to users, create great designs, it’s not enough. You need to get the strategy right."
"It’s not enough to have great people; you need to create the space that brings out their best."
"The short order cook designer executes basic recipes without room for innovation or creativity."
"Designers embedded as the only designer on a team often feel lonely and disconnected from their peers."
"When you organize design around customer journeys, features become weigh stations along the path, not the focus."
"Product managers and engineers are now recognizing the need to organize teams around customers and their experiences."
"Enterprise companies often mistake process for quality, losing sight of the content and impact of their design work."
"You need the courage to say no: I’m not going to spread my team so thin that we cannot deliver quality."
"Strong design leadership manages down, across, and up, enabling teams to do their best work."
"A team larger than seven people should probably be split; smaller teams can do focused and effective work."
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