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

by Peter Merholz

We get better at understanding business, the needs of people, the operations of our creativity, and the framework in which we find the freedom to apply our skills. We get better at being active partners to analysts, marketers, and engineers. We get better at building services and experiences, not just features. We get better at seeing the bigger picture.

design is way less mature than other corporate functions, and its practice and impact suffer because of its lack of sophistication.

In large part, Mint was acquired for its design, as that was the primary factor contributing to its desirable metrics.

Dell became the market leader for personal computers because it was better than any other company at managing a supply chain.

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.

Feature parity was an acceptable strategy when software was a less mature discipline, but now software competes not just on function, but experience as well.

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.

This “consumerization of IT” has accelerated as people who have been steeped in digital technology since childhood (read: “millennials”) have entered the workforce, and they have higher expectations from technology than those who preceded them.

experience. This led traditional service industries (finance, retail, travel, hospitality) to closely follow consumer tech companies (such as Apple, Yahoo, and Netscape) to be among the first to build significant in-house design organizations.

Business in the industrial and information ages of the 19th and 20th centuries was dominated by the analytical approaches typical in scientific management and engineering. Such reductive approaches are insufficient for tackling the complex challenges companies now face.

Squeezing greater efficiency has run its course, and design’s generative qualities are seen as a means to realize new business value. Given software’s abstract nature, design is required to tether the experience to something people can understand; with networked software, this challenge is exponentialized.

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.

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

The genius of the diamond shape is that it shows, for both definition and execution, that the team first engages in divergent thinking that broadens the possibility space, before turning a corner and practicing the convergent thinking that narrows in on a specific solution.

If organizations are going to embrace all that design has to offer, this must involve influencing product and even corporate strategy.

An architect would never propose a building design without presenting stakeholders a scale model; filmmakers write scripts and draw storyboards before rounding up a crew and committing to a foot of film. Likewise, bringing the design activities of user research, sketching, ideation, and rapid prototyping into strategy work ensures these issues won’t arise.

At the rise of the Web, most companies handled the need for design through external vendors. They didn’t have capabilities in-house, and weren’t sure it was worth the investment. Twenty years in, it’s clear that we are in a new normal. The shift to networked software and multi-touchpoint services has created a fundamentally chaotic and unpredictable environment that requires continuous delivery.

Historically, the ultimate authority in product development lived with someone representing “the business,” such as product marketing, general managers, or product managers, who took in an understanding of market needs, articulated a set of requirements, and gave that to teams to build. For software products, the technology became too complex to locate all decisions in a single product manager — delivering quality work required that people with technical depth also be given authority. This led to teams with joint product and engineering leadership. As we enter a world of connected software and services, the primacy of relationships and need for quality user experience cannot be addressed only through technical and business expertise.

Designers should no longer be handed briefs and requirements, but instead be part of the conversation earlier to make sure that their empathetic perspective is represented. The reality of contemporary product and service delivery is a messy one, and requires the productive tension between business, technology, and design.

Pulling all this together, we arrive at an expanded role for design.

that automatically lumping design with user experience gives short shrift to all the other disciplines that contribute to the user experience. A user’s experience is the emergent outcome of numerous contributions, including design, but also engineering (technical performance has a huge impact on user experience), marketing (how expectations are managed affects the user experience), and customer care (a bad experience can become a good one if handled well). If a single team is labeled as the primary keeper of the user experience, that absolves other departments from concerning themselves with it. User experience must be everyone’s responsibility.

talent isn’t sufficient. The second lesson is that to get the most out of a team requires sensitive management, visionary leadership, and well-run operations. Design teams often suffer in this second area because, compared with other corporate functions like engineering and marketing, design is newer and its appreciation is less sophisticated. This nascency means that (a) most people in an organization have never worked with a truly effective design team, and (b) most designers haven’t been part of fully actualized teams, and so they don’t know what they need in order to realize their own potential.

We’re not here just to make it pretty or easy to use. Through empathy, we ensure meaning and utility. With craft, we elicit understanding and desire. We wrangle the complexity of our offering to deliver a clear, coherent, and satisfying experience from start to finish.

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

We’re using the phrase “focused leadership” to mean one or two people are running design and are from within the design organization — these leaders are not also overseeing other functions.

The skills that made someone a great designer or creative director are almost wholly unrelated to the skills that make them a great manager

as the team grows, it might become necessary to split leadership into two — one person focused on creative matters, and the other on operational.

because design teams are always asked to do more than they have the capacity for, leadership must be able to prioritize their own efforts.

served. Nothing beats going into people’s homes or offices, and following them as they go about their days.

Good user research, particularly out in the field, reveals a richness of understanding that you simply cannot get anywhere else.

the design team must have access to, and be involved with, all aspects of the customers’ journeys.

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. Also, whereas traditional marketing design was delivered through media (publications, broadcast, billboards) and product design was for a thing placed on a retail shelf, in a world of connected software, the platform for many marketing and product experiences has converged in digital realms such as email, web, and mobile. Granted, there are efforts particular to specific media — users don’t interact with products on a billboard — but those are relatively few, and diminishing.

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.

potential, it must operate across a range not only of skills, but of conceptual scale, from the “big picture” down to the pixel and pica.

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.

uptime, “high-quality design” is understood through subjective measures rooted in personal preference and taste.

To overcome this, the design organization must be empowered to define quality standards for their team and their organization. Those standards then must be externalized so that others know what is being upheld.

shifting design critique from a stance of personal preferences (“I really love this shade of blue”) or a desire to stand out (the infamous “make the logo bigger”) to an agreed-upon set of principles and guidelines that explain the team’s definition of quality, supported by numerous examples of design work that demonstrate good quality with callouts as to why.

A design organization is only as good as what it delivers, and if it is producing crap because it’s trying to do too many things, then the rest of the organization will associate design with crap.

Design leaders need to wield the power of “No.” Design work should only be done when adequately prioritized and staffed, and when there is time to develop quality solutions.

range of approaches and methods to solve them appropriately. “We must follow a user-centered design process” may sound like a good plan, but when any process becomes an assumption or accepted dogma, it becomes a crutch that replaces critical thinking.

Designers can have trouble realizing that delivery is just part of an ongoing process. For those who went to design school, every time they made something, they had one chance to get it right. And even digital design practices have their roots in traditional media, where once something is produced, it’s in the world and out of your hands. This background encourages perfectionism, with a concomitant unwillingness to ship until you get it just right. With connected software and services, delivery should be frequent. By making delivery a habit (and not a rare event), the idea of The Launch loses its paralyzing power.

The department name “Human Resources” demonstrates how many companies think of their employees — not as people, but as economic units whose role is to contribute to a company’s productivity.

Actualized design teams overcome such practices by treating team members as individuals, with all the messiness implied. They recognize job titles are imperfect, and two people with the same title may have different skills.

Seniority levels are seen as guidelines, not strict containers.

effort. Designers, perhaps more than other professionals, are a sensitive, empathetic, expressive, and quirky bunch. Reducing them to labels and levels removes their individuality, blunting their engagement and, in turn, their work. Instead, celebrate their individuality. Let their freak flags fly.

A natural mistake made by design managers is to build a team of people who look and act just like them. It’s what they’re comfortable with, what they know, and because they have succeeded, it stands to reason that others just like them will, too. This leads to staffing a team of clones, solving problems in a similar fashion, restricted by groupthink, and limiting exploration by aligning on solutions too early in the process.

To achieve meaningful divergence requires that those doing the work come from a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds.

Avoid hiring graduates only from the same limited set of schools, and instead cast the net wide.

Race and ethnic diversity have long been challenges for the design industry, and very little has changed in the 20 years the authors have worked in the field. It’s not an easy problem to solve, because even those eager to hire for diversity are hindered by the lack of diverse candidates. And diverse candidates might find themselves subject to unintentionally biased recruiting, interviewing, and promotion practices.