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

by Peter Merholz

A key sign of a healthy design culture is how often designers engage directly with customers.

When the efforts of the design team are made external and explicit (posted on walls and on large displays), visitors see all the work that design is doing, and initiate serendipitous conversations that go beyond the immediate tasks at hand.

Design leaders must remember to have frequent conversations about drawing boundaries, taking time to recharge, and setting a strong example of what proper work hours look like.

Even if the updates are brief, daily or semi-daily communications through a project management tool like Basecamp go a long way to provide insights and confidence to other team members and stakeholders spread out across the organization.

Survey the team Ask everyone on the team two simple questions: What’s working well? What’s not working? Identify the top three in each category, as well as the overlaps, and put a plan in place to address them. Assign owners and small teams to lead initiatives. This should happen at regular intervals and any time a major milestone is completed.

the CEO could go to this single room, look around at the work posted on walls and emanating from people’s screens, and see what was happening across his entire company. The lens of design activity enables a perspective that no other function provides.

What these stories point out is that design can be a function with great leverage, where a relatively small number of people can have an outsized impact. However, most design teams are not ready to take advantage. This gets at the crux of why we’ve written this book — in order for design to capitalize on this remarkable opportunity, it needs to get its organizational act together.

And while we firmly believe the Centralized Partnership is superior to either full centralization, or embedded and decentralized design, this diagram depicts a key drawback. The Centralized Partnership still conforms to the “features” world.