Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams
Tags: #design #leadership #management #teams #culture #innovation #business #organizational design
Authors: Peter Merholz, Kristin Skinner
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Overview
This book is a handbook for business and design leaders who are building and managing design organizations within enterprises. We recognize that design is way less mature than other corporate functions and needs greater sophistication. Companies aren’t realizing the potential of their design investments and are in need of a framework for their design teams to thrive. Design is not just about aesthetics; it is a core competency vital to business success, capable of driving innovation and creating new value. In this book, we’ve gathered our insights and experience from working with many designers, agencies, and companies, and provide guidance on organizational structure, recruiting, developing talent, and fostering successful cross-team collaboration. We introduce the Centralized Partnership, a new organizational model that combines a centralized structure with dedicated, skills-complete design teams partnered with specific business areas. We’ve also included a comprehensive framework for career progression and professional development, recognizing that investing in designers benefits a company’s reputation, retention, and recruiting efforts. Ultimately, this book is a call to action for design leaders to step up, embrace their unique perspective, and establish design as a driving force for innovation and impact within their organizations.
Book Outline
1. Why Design? Why Now?
The business world’s increasing reliance on software and services has created a need for strong design competency. Design is no longer simply about aesthetics, but about shaping experiences and creating value for businesses. This shift is driven by the consumerization of software, where users expect seamless, intuitive, and delightful experiences.
Key concept: Design’s ascension within businesses is driven by the need for greater efficiency and innovation. This new emphasis on design stems from the recognition that traditional, analytical business approaches are no longer sufficient for tackling the complex challenges companies face in the digital age.
2. Realizing the Potential of Design
To fully leverage design’s potential, we need to move beyond seeing it as mere “problem-solving.” Design is a powerful tool for problem framing, strategy development, and injecting humanism into work. Service design, with its focus on customer journeys and experience ecosystems, helps create intentional and holistic service experiences.
Key concept: Design is not just problem-solving but a way to inject humanism into work. The best-designed products and services don’t just solve problems—they connect with people on a deeper level.
3. 12 Qualities of Effective Design Organizations
Building a successful design organization requires more than just talented designers. It needs a strong foundation that includes a shared sense of purpose, focused and empowered leadership, authentic user empathy, and a deep understanding of how to create business value. These qualities ensure the team operates with clarity, intentionality, and a focus on delivering impactful results.
Key concept: Effective design organizations are built upon a foundation of shared purpose, focused leadership, authentic user empathy, and an understanding of business value. These foundational elements drive a team’s behavior and establish its identity within the company.
4. The Centralized Partnership
There are two common organizational models for design teams: centralized internal services and decentralized and embedded teams. Both models have their drawbacks. Centralized services can be slow and disempowering, while decentralized teams can lead to fractured experiences and a lack of cohesion. The Centralized Partnership model offers a better approach by combining a centralized structure with dedicated, skills-complete design teams that partner with specific business areas.
Key concept: The Centralized Partnership offers the benefits of both centralized and decentralized models by combining a centralized structure with dedicated, skills-complete design teams that partner with specific aspects of the business.
5. Roles and Team Composition
In the Centralized Partnership model, design teams are organized into skills-complete units dedicated to specific aspects of the business. This structure allows for specialization, focused collaboration, and a deeper understanding of the target audience. Teams can be organized by customer type or stage of the customer journey, ensuring a holistic and coherent experience across all touchpoints.
Key concept: Organizing by customer type: Design teams should be structured around different customer segments or user types, fostering a deep understanding of their needs and enabling a more tailored and empathetic approach to design.
6. Recruiting and Hiring
Recruiting and hiring designers requires a different approach than other disciplines. Designers are motivated by the nature of the work, the environment, and the opportunity to work with interesting people. The recruiting process should be humanistic, emphasizing the work to be done, and being transparent about the company culture and expectations.
Key concept: Make the approach humanistic: Design recruiting should be approached with a human touch, recognizing that designers are often sensitive to bureaucracy and impersonal processes. Emphasize the work to be done, explain the environment, and be honest and frank about the opportunity to attract the right talent.
7. Developing the Team: Professional Growth and Managing People
Designers need opportunities for professional growth and development to advance in their careers. A levels framework with clear criteria can help guide career progression and identify areas for improvement. In addition to core design skills, designers should develop soft skills like communication and facilitation, as well as leadership skills like strategy and mentorship, to effectively lead teams and drive impact within organizations.
Key concept: Beyond deepening and broadening their design skills, designers must also develop soft skills and leadership skills as they progress in their careers. Facilitation, communication, strategy, empathy, and mentorship are essential for senior designers to drive impact and lead teams.
8. Creating a Design Culture
Before attempting to influence a company’s culture to embrace design, design leaders must first establish a strong and healthy culture within their own team. This involves creating physical and virtual environments that foster collaboration, transparency, and a sense of community. By prioritizing “maker time,” providing regular critiques, and engaging with customers directly, designers can create a thriving culture that sets the stage for broader impact.
Key concept: Design leader, heal thyself. The design organization’s impact on the broader company will be limited if its own culture is not one that supports doing great work.
9. Successful Interaction with Other Disciplines
Collaborating effectively with other disciplines, such as product management and engineering, is crucial for design’s success. By focusing on achievability, establishing clear decision-making processes, maintaining quality standards, and fostering open communication, designers can build strong relationships with their cross-functional counterparts and ensure that design plays a meaningful role in delivering great products and services.
Key concept: For design to succeed cross-functionally, it must have clear leadership and be seen as a peer. It’s not enough to simply participate in cross-functional teams; design needs to be a driving force, shaping the conversation and ensuring a holistic customer experience.
10. Parting Thoughts
As design becomes more integrated into businesses, it’s important for designers to retain their unique perspective and approach. Design’s value lies in its ability to challenge assumptions, explore new ideas, and inject humanism into work. By embracing their “weirdness” and maintaining a distinct vantage point, designers can continue to drive innovation and create impactful experiences.
Key concept: Keep design weird. Design’s value lies in its distinct perspective and approach, which can be perceived as “weird” within the corporate context. Designers should embrace this weirdness, maintaining their distinct vantage point and using it to challenge assumptions and drive innovation.
Essential Questions
1. Why is design becoming increasingly important for businesses?
The authors argue that design’s increasing importance within businesses stems from several key factors. First, the rise of software and services has made design essential for creating user-friendly and engaging experiences. Second, businesses have realized that traditional analytical approaches are insufficient for tackling complex challenges and that design’s generative qualities can unlock new value. Third, the consumerization of software has raised user expectations, making design a key differentiator in a competitive marketplace.
2. How can design contribute to a company’s success?
Design can contribute to a company’s success in several ways. It can drive innovation by generating new ideas and solutions, enhance customer experience by making products and services more usable and engaging, improve efficiency by streamlining processes and reducing costs, and strengthen a company’s brand by creating a cohesive and memorable identity.
3. What is the Centralized Partnership model, and why is it a better approach than traditional organizational models for design teams?
The Centralized Partnership model balances the benefits of both centralized and decentralized organizational structures. It provides a central point of leadership and coordination while allowing for dedicated, skills-complete design teams to partner with specific business areas. This structure fosters collaboration and ensures a consistent design vision across the company while allowing for flexibility and autonomy at the team level.
4. What are the key considerations for recruiting and hiring designers?
Recruiting and hiring designers requires a unique approach that emphasizes the human element and focuses on the nature of the work, the company culture, and the opportunity for growth. Design leaders should prioritize building relationships with candidates, showcasing the compelling aspects of the work, and being transparent about the company’s values and challenges.
5. How can design teams successfully navigate the challenges of working within large organizations?
Designers can navigate the challenges of working within large organizations by focusing on building relationships, communicating effectively, advocating for design’s value, and maintaining a strong sense of identity and purpose. By embracing their “weirdness” and demonstrating their ability to drive business results, designers can earn respect and influence, establishing design as a core competency within the company.
Key Takeaways
1. Embrace Service Design
Service design shifts the focus from designing artifacts to designing experiences. By mapping customer journeys, identifying pain points, and prototyping new solutions, designers can create holistic, intentional, and impactful service experiences that address the customer’s needs at every touchpoint.
Practical Application:
A design team at a healthcare company can leverage service design to improve the patient experience. By mapping the patient journey, identifying pain points, and prototyping new service solutions, they can create a more seamless, efficient, and empathetic healthcare experience.
2. Prioritize User Empathy
Authentic user empathy is essential for creating impactful design solutions. By going beyond traditional market research and engaging with users directly, designers develop a deeper understanding of their needs, behaviors, and pain points, which allows them to create solutions that are truly relevant and effective.
Practical Application:
When leading a design team working on a new AI-powered product, it’s important to instill a culture of user-centered design. Encourage regular user research, usability testing, and feedback gathering to ensure that the product meets the real needs and expectations of its users. Frame discussions and decisions around the user’s perspective, and prioritize design solutions that are both innovative and user-friendly.
3. Utilize the Double Diamond Model
The Double Diamond model provides a framework for effective problem-solving and design execution. It emphasizes both divergent thinking (exploring a wide range of possibilities) and convergent thinking (narrowing down to the best solution). By following this model, design teams can ensure that their solutions are well-informed, innovative, and impactful.
Practical Application:
A design team working on a new mobile app can use the Double Diamond model to guide their process. During the ‘Definition’ phase, they can conduct user research and competitive analysis to understand the problem space and define the target audience. In the ‘Execution’ phase, they can brainstorm solutions, prototype and test, and iterate on the design until it meets user needs and business goals.
4. Empower Design Leadership
Focused, empowered leadership is crucial for building and leading successful design teams. This means giving designers autonomy, providing clear direction and support, and advocating for design’s value within the organization. By creating a culture of trust and ownership, design leaders can foster creativity, innovation, and a sense of purpose within their team.
Practical Application:
A design leader at a technology company can empower their team by giving them autonomy over project decisions, encouraging them to take ownership of their work, and advocating for their ideas within the broader organization. They can also provide opportunities for professional development, mentoring, and career growth, recognizing that investing in their team’s growth is essential for the team’s and the company’s success.
Suggested Deep Dive
Chapter: Chapter 3: 12 Qualities of Effective Design Organizations
This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the key characteristics of successful design organizations, outlining a framework that can be used to assess and improve team performance.
Memorable Quotes
The Power of Design. 5
The reality is that designers have never been in a better situation to make an impact on the world. Our methods and thinking are valued and respected. We not only make the things but we help create the strategy that brings the things to life. So now what? We get better.
“Software Is Eating the World”. 22
Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.
Realizing the Potential of Design. 23
Design is the rendering of intent. The designer imagines an outcome and puts forth activities to make that outcome real.
8. Value Delivery Over Perfection. 52
Real artists ship.
Environment. 173
We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.
Comparative Analysis
Compared to other books about design, “Org Design for Design Orgs” takes a less craft-focused approach and tackles the organizational and operational aspects of building and leading design teams. While books like “This Is Service Design Doing” by Stickdorn et al. dive deep into the methods and practices of service design, our book focuses on the “why” and “how” of establishing design as a core competency within a business. We agree with authors like Kuniavsky who highlight the importance of “service avatars” and the shift from products to services, but we take it a step further by providing concrete guidance on structuring design teams to support this new reality. Similarly, we echo Norman’s emphasis on the importance of design in managing complexity and fostering partnerships, and our book aims to equip design leaders with the tools and strategies to make that partnership successful.
Reflection
This book provides a valuable framework for establishing and managing design organizations within enterprises, particularly as businesses increasingly recognize the importance of design in a software-driven world. However, it is important to acknowledge that the book’s perspective is primarily focused on the needs and experiences of designers. While the authors advocate for cross-functional collaboration and user-centered design, there is a risk of perpetuating the “designer as hero” narrative. It’s crucial for design leaders to remember that design is just one piece of the puzzle, and that successful product and service delivery requires a collaborative effort from all disciplines. Furthermore, the book’s emphasis on “keeping design weird” might be interpreted as a resistance to integrating design within the broader organizational context. While maintaining a distinct perspective is important, designers must also learn to adapt and collaborate effectively within existing structures and processes. Ultimately, the book’s strength lies in its practical guidance and actionable insights, providing a valuable resource for design leaders navigating the complexities of building and managing successful design organizations.
Flashcards
What is the Double Diamond model?
A model for product definition and delivery, consisting of two diamonds that represent the divergent and convergent thinking involved in defining a strategy and executing a plan.
What is the Centralized Partnership model?
A design organizational structure that combines centralized leadership with dedicated, skills-complete teams partnered with specific business areas.
What are the four key elements of a strong foundation for a design organization?
Ensure the team has a shared sense of purpose, focused leadership, authentic user empathy, and a deep understanding of business value.
What are the four key qualities of effective design output?
Support the entire customer journey, deliver at all levels of scale, establish and uphold quality standards, and value delivery over perfection.
What are four essential management practices for design organizations?
Treat team members as people, prioritize diversity, foster a collaborative environment, and manage operations effectively.
What is passive candidate sourcing?
The practice of reaching out to individuals who are currently employed elsewhere and may not be actively seeking new opportunities.
What is the Personal Professional Mission?
A tool used to define the motivations and career goals of individual team members, helping managers understand their aspirations and guide their development.