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

by Peter Merholz

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. Companies beholden to the archaic “marketing” and “product” distinctions also get in the way of new opportunities, such as the rise of “growth” product development, where what would have been considered a classic marketing function (acquiring users) becomes part of product development.

recognize when something is “ready,” because with software, you’re never really done.[

Design may be seen only as aesthetics and styling, or as one former client referred to it, “SUAC: Shut Up and Color.”

users (Growth and Reviews). These product teams report up through a VP of Product Management, but otherwise don’t have much structure overlaid. An embedded model would place designers within each product team. While the Centralized Partnership could mimic that, with design teams organized by product, what’s more appropriate is an independent structure overlaid on this product organization, supporting distinct buyer and seller experiences (Figure 4-4).

“What were her strengths as a team lead? Her weaknesses?” “How did she help you in your work?” “How was she in working with engineers and product managers?” “Were I to hire this person, what would I need to do as her manager to help her be successful?”