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

by Peter Merholz

When the product development team is small, it’s easy for designers, engineers, and product managers to all sit together. As the team scales within the building and across geographies, it becomes necessary to explicitly decide where team members sit — do they sit with other designers, even if they’re not working on the same problems, or do they sit with their respective teams, co-locating with engineers, product management, or marketing? Ideally, the answer can be “both.” A healthy approach is for designers to spend chunks of time in both contexts, where execution time is spent with the cross-functional team, and reflection and review time happens among other designers. This requires both a design studio space and available desk space within cross-functional teams. If space is at a premium and a choice must be made, then it’s a matter of “it depends.” If the design team is relatively new, or in a period of low morale, they makes sense to keep the designers together to bolster their culture and sense of belonging. As the design team matures, it become less reliant on constant contact, at which point it makes sense to shift designer focus to their respective teams. This also has the effect of spreading the design mindset to other parts of the organization.