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

by Peter Merholz

Designers working in-house typically found that the company discouraged such participation. There was no direct benefit, and it was seen as a distraction from doing the work. Also, companies feared that sensitive intellectual property may be shared. Now, however, given the Global War for Talent, public speaking and writing are seen as means to help recruiting, signaling to other designers that interesting work is taking place.

Offer an education credit to each staff member, around US$2,000–3,000 per year, for conferences, books, evening classes, online courses.

Professional development is often described as “climbing the corporate ladder.” It implies the employee has a careerist bent, and a narrow, steady focus to reach the next rung. Often, such a linear orientation is not of interest to designers. Many don’t seek to climb so much as to grow. Their motivations are more internal, pursuing mastery, seeking autonomy, following threads of personal interest, and tackling challenges that align with passions. This bushy, meandering growth is more like climbing the corporate trellis.

Design’s inability to have meaningful organizational impact is often the result of an unintentional or polluted team culture. Before attempting broad, company-wide change, make sure the design team’s culture has been purposefully constructed to encourage the best work.

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.

The act of drafting a charter is a remarkable exercise for a team to go through. It will be contentious, and force people to deeply consider just why they’re doing what they’re doing. The result, a printed document, is the first step to making the abstract and potentially nebulous notion of “values” into something concrete. The next step is shaping the space that upholds these values to support the work.

It’s crucial that these spaces, physical and virtual, manifest the values of the design organization. In turn, those spaces will enable new kinds of work previously unconsidered.

It is still common for offices to be divvied up into cubicles, with fluorescent-lit conference rooms with one whiteboard as the only places where people can come together to collaborate; design teams are often spread out across floors, buildings, and campuses. These environments are death to creativity and innovation.

creation of a library.

For a design team to work in a virtual environment, it’s important to do so with tools suited for collaboration: chat tools like Slack or HipChat; project communication and coordination tools like Basecamp, Asana, and Trello; shared file servers like Box and Dropbox; cloud-based collaborative productivity tools like Google Apps and Mural.ly, and design feedback tools like Wake.

A special class of activities takes place when a new member joins the team. Thoughtful onboarding is the difference between a new member feeling welcome, knowing where stuff is, and hitting the ground running, or someone feeling confused, uncertain, and unable to work.

dependable work cadence,

a few principles can make critique a positive experience for the team, and serve its purpose of maintaining a high quality bar: Designers should provide multiple solutions

Orient feedback in terms of objectives and results, not preference

Be respectful, but candid

Everyone gets a turn to comment, and leaders comment last (if at all)

Discussing Design (O’Reilly, 2015), by Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry, is an excellent book for digging deep into this topic.

Great design is difficult to achieve in a reductive process or environment that is keenly focused on speed and efficiency.

At Adaptive Path, we utilize stakeholder maps (Figure 9-1) at the outset of an initiative as a scoping and planning tool to define core, direct, and indirect stakeholders as well as understand business needs/value and customer needs/value.

In order to focus, the design organization must have mechanisms in place for saying “yes,” “no,” or “not yet” to the work itself.

Margaret Gould Stewart, now VP of Design at Facebook, created a set of attribute cards to use for setting expectations for individuals on teams.

Example of topics to include in an operating agreement: How we’ll integrate as one team Communication plan Availability of key staff for work sessions How we’ll work with the Insights group — access to key insights, and for new research, timing, recruiting, protocols, and field research Stakeholder approvals and timing Process for escalation and issue resolution Assumptions for deliverables — timing, type, and fidelity To create an operating agreement, facilitate two sessions with the full team. In the first session, brainstorm ideas without judgment or discussion, then discuss ideas and build an affinity diagram. Let ideas rest for at least a day, then reconvene to review the work, discuss and modify any ideas or categories, and finalize the list. Finally, publish the operating agreement alongside or within your team charter as a one-pager or slide in a deck.

when a San Francisco fast-growth tech company moved to new headquarters, their team of 40 designers was placed in one room, a large studio space. An unintended consequence of this placement is that 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.

once a month, he gathered work from across the entire design team, and shared it out to product, marketing, engineering, and executive leadership. In roughly a single hour, he could present the entire breadth of Groupon’s activity as seen through the lens of his team. After the first session, the CEO told him that it was already the most important meeting at the company. This is because nowhere else could you see such a broad scope in such a manageable fashion.

Design is a different kind of activity than engineering, and what works for technical development is not ideal for great design. By behaving as “team players,” design becomes overly accommodating, and loses what makes it interesting in the first place. And what makes design interesting is that, within corporate and enterprise contexts, it is weird. It can be soft, empathetic, touchy-feely, and expressive. People that have grown accustomed to hard, reductive, and dispassionate modes of operating may find such approaches disconcerting and off-putting. Instead of trying to conform in order to fit in, designers must respectfully maintain their distinct vantage.