Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams

by Peter Merholz

However, systems have limits to their efficiency. Beyond a certain point, additional streamlining efforts return negligible gains. Once a company realizes it has run out of optimizations, the only way to grow is through increasing the top line. This led to the cult of “innovation” that began in the late 1990s and continues to this day.

Software, by its nature, dwells in abstractions, and making sense of those abstractions proves difficult for most people.

For a while this affected only consumer products, where individuals had the power to choose what to buy. Enterprise software design remained terrible for a few reasons: the person buying the software was usually not the person using it; the people using it had no alternative; a belief that bad design could be overcome through training; and a sense that work shouldn’t be fun or pleasant, and that software should reflect such seriousness. However, the market for enterprise software has evolved. Companies realized the productivity drag of poor software, and users, as their sophistication grew, were less willing to put up with bad design.

Problem solving is only the tip of the iceberg for design. Beneath the surface, design is a powerful tool for problem framing, ensuring that what is being addressed is worth tackling. Go deeper still, and you discover that the core opportunity for design is to inject humanism into work. The best designed products and services don’t simply solve problems — they connect deeply with people.

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that

ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product

“Design is the rendering of intent.” He continues, “The designer imagines an outcome and puts forth activities to make that outcome real.”[7]

An emerging discipline called “service design” reframes how organizations utilize design. Historically, design has been focused on the creation of things, whether in service of marketing (advertising, branding, packaging) or product (industrial design, software design). Service design applies many of the same practices, but pulls back from this emphasis on artifacts, instead assuming a broader view in an effort to understand the relationships between people (customers, frontline employees, management, partners) and the activities they take part in. Artifacts are no longer considered on their own, but as tools in a larger service ecosystem.

The logical conclusion of the journey mindset is that design practices that are currently kept separate — marketing, communication, environments, and digital products — all contribute to a single journey, and ought to be coordinated.

At Airbnb, extensive user research was done to build deep personas for Hosts and Guests, which included their respective customer journeys. Airbnb then brought on an artist from Pixar to illustrate key moments in the journey, and these visual storyboards help orient design, engineering, and business around common goals.

Even with all these obvious benefits, many organizations resist making strategy concrete. By remaining in abstraction as long as possible, hard decisions do not have to be made. Trade-offs do not have to be realized, and everyone can believe that their pet idea will see it through. When design contributes to strategy, it challenges this mindset, and forces stakeholders to commit.

A design team needs to be in charge of its own destiny, and this requires focused leadership with autonomy and executive access.

It strikes me that this is the clear method for a product manager or team to build their “instinct” on an ongoing basis. No decisions about the future of the product or service should be made in absence of authentic user empathy as provided by user research from the field on an ongoing basis.

Savvy design leaders embrace business value, realizing it can serve as a powerful input into the design process. Whether it’s “hard” metrics such as improving conversion rates or increasing engagement times, or “soft” matters such as representing the company’s brand in an elegant and appropriate way, these connections to what the company cares about are crucial for keeping design efforts on track. And when these business objectives are paired with authentic user empathy, new means of value creation can emerge. When design organizations propose ways to unlock new business value, their credibility and impact increases.

Another implication is that there should be only one design organization to undergird the entire customer journey. This runs contrary to a common practice, where companies often have two teams — a product or UX design team and a marketing design team. This is the legacy of 20th-century mass manufacturing thinking, where the way a product is designed and developed is divorced from how the product is sold and talked about. In a services world, this distinction no longer holds. “Marketing” and “product” experiences are simply milestones on the same customer journey.

Designers can no longer rely solely on the hard skills of their practice and craft to succeed. They need to facilitate the creative output of others throughout the organization, tapping into a resource often left dormant. If working in a hospital setting, get nurses, technicians, and doctors to ideate around their specific problems. In a call center, have the customer service representatives pitch how they think things should be. The point isn’t to be bound to the input from other functions — the design organization still has the crucial responsibility of refining, honing, and executing these ideas. But realize that the problems we’re solving are too big for any one team to have a complete handle on.

A design organization is ultimately judged by the quality of its output. What’s tricky is that there’s no universal definition of design quality. So while “high-quality engineering” is typically considered through quantifiable metrics such as reduction of bugs shipped, speed of performance, and service uptime, “high-quality design” is understood through subjective measures rooted in personal preference and taste. Sure, design solutions can have quantitative performance measures such as conversion rates and task completion, but they are insufficient in establishing quality. The ultimate assessment of quality often exists in the eyes of the beholders.