This year, I’ve helped 5 design teams draft their charter. At the outset of this work is a series of 4 2-hour group sessions (it used to be a one-day workshop in a conference room) to define different aspects of the team. Having done it a bunch now, I’ve developed a fairly strong agenda forContinue reading “Define your design team—here’s an agenda for creating a charter”
Category Archives: organization design
Emerging role in design orgs: The Super Senior Individual Contributor (Principal Designer, Design Architect)
As design organizations scale, many design leaders are realizing that they’re missing a key function—strategic thinking and creative direction that can make sense of the effort of a design team that is working across many products, or distinct parts of a customer journey. In the book, we implore design orgs to deliver at all levelsContinue reading “Emerging role in design orgs: The Super Senior Individual Contributor (Principal Designer, Design Architect)”
Design orgs, and the design profession, needs to get its shit together before expecting others to do so.
“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” – John 8:7 How you run your design org is doing more to inhibit its potential than anything else within your company An impetus for writing Org Design for Design Orgs was a realization I had when taking over designContinue reading “Design orgs, and the design profession, needs to get its shit together before expecting others to do so.”
The Most Important Role In Your Design Org: Team Lead
Discussions of design leadership tend to look upward, toward the executives and directors who sit atop the organization. And while those folks are indeed important, their efforts overshadow what I’ve realized is the most impactful role in a design organization: the “lower-middle management” of the Design Team Lead. Defining Team Lead To make sure weContinue reading “The Most Important Role In Your Design Org: Team Lead”
Design at Scale is People!
I believe the single most interesting challenge and opportunity for design as a practice and function is to figure out how to operate at scale. Upon reflection, our book was essentially about setting up your organization to deliver design at scale. Much of “design at scale” discussion is dominated by design systems (most of whichContinue reading “Design at Scale is People!”
Conduct better designer portfolio reviews with this tool
TL;DR: Here’s a Portfolio Review–Set-up and Assessment Tool for you to use. A couple years ago I contracted with Capital One to help bring some order to their rapidly expanding design organization. I focused on recruiting and hiring practices–when you’ve got ~40 open reqs, you want to make those processes as efficient and effective asContinue reading “Conduct better designer portfolio reviews with this tool”
If I were to write a second edition of Org Design for Design Orgs…
It’s been about two years since Org Design For Design Orgs came out. After having worked with it, taught it, and spoken with many design leaders and seen many design orgs, there’s a list of things I know I’d want to address if we wrote a second edition (note: no plans to do so). Make dual-trackContinue reading “If I were to write a second edition of Org Design for Design Orgs…”
Read about athenahealth’s smart, pragmatic approach to scaling design within an agile product organization
For the kind of nerds who dig this website, I suggest visiting athenahealth’s Experience Design’s recently updated Medium site, with 5 articles related to design org matters. Of particular note are: “Embedding Product Design in a Large Agile Organization“, which addresses the challenge of having ~85 designers work across >200 scrum teams while maintaining qualityContinue reading “Read about athenahealth’s smart, pragmatic approach to scaling design within an agile product organization”
New Team (and Role) for Big Design Orgs: Design Management (and its head)
(This post was developed with input from Kristin. Like how we wrote the whole book!) (Also, this post is very much about an idea that is a Work in Progress. I’d love feedback to help sharpen it.) Design organizations, particularly ones that grow beyond 100 or so (and definitely beyond 150), find themselves in uncharteredContinue reading “New Team (and Role) for Big Design Orgs: Design Management (and its head)”
Stop separating product and marketing design–how rebranding Snag showed me it’s all one design
On my personal site, http://peterme.com/, I’ve written a four-part series on how we rebranded Snagajob to Snag (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4). In the context of “org design for design orgs,” there’s a key learning worth sharing. Some context will help. Traditionally, when building internal design capabilities, companies distinguished design for marketing, which would reportContinue reading “Stop separating product and marketing design–how rebranding Snag showed me it’s all one design”
Org Design for Design Orgs 