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. Given a single design organization invited to work end to end throughout the customer’s journey, a third implication arises: the need for a vast array of desig...