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

service designers operate within Structure and Strategy, specifying the design of a system that will deliver a great service experience. While craft is important, this role is more about coordination—the service designer works hard to connect with all the frontline people who will be delivering the service. At the outset of work, this involves facilitation and co-creation, coming up with solutions that will work across roles and contexts. When the solutions are deployed, the focus shifts to training and implementation, supporting people as they execute the service.

Design Program Management operates at a strategic level, where it introduces design as a powerful tool with value to both the business, in helping to differentiate the company from competitors, and to customers, through guiding innovative and human-centered products, services, and brands

Using the generic “product designers,” regardless of whether they are more Structure- or Surface-oriented, provides for team members’ growth and agency. It encourages designers to bolster skills that they are weaker in and discourages others in the organization from pigeon-holing them into a narrow set of expectations.

While great product design can be the product of intuition, great end-to-end service design requires the deeply empathic perspective born of user research

Product designers are people who can interpret the complexity of software into a form that is accessible and understandable to users.

oversee the end-to-end experience, ensuring that user needs are understood, business objectives are clear, design solutions are appropriate, and the final quality is high.

Manage down
Leads are responsible for overall team performance. They need to create a space (whether physical or conceptual) where great design work can happen. They must coach, guide, mentor, and prod. They address collaboration challenges, personality conflicts, unclear mandates, and people’s emotions.
Manage across
Design leads coordinate with product leads, business leads, technology leads, and people in other functions in order to make sure their teams’ work is appropriately integrated with the larger whole. They must also be able to credibly push back on unreasonable requirements, and goad when others claim that the design team’s work is too difficult to be delivered.
Manage up
It’s crucial that these leads are comfortable talking to executives, whether it’s to explain the rationale behind design decisions or to make the case for spending money, whether on people or facilities. Design leads must present clear arguments, delivered without frustration, that demonstrate how their work ties into the larger goals and objectives of the business.

Great design work takes space—places to collaborate, whiteboards for sketching and ideation, walls to show work. And those spaces should be permanent, places where the team works and sees their work all around them

instead of having occasional big share-outs (that require preparation that takes time away from productivity), these spaces support frequent lightweight check-ins. This keeps the work on track, because if it begins to veer off-course, it is quickly corrected.

frank and candid critique and feedback are essential for upholding the quality standards. Greatness comes from the tension and collision of different perspectives (a concept known as “creative abrasion”), addressed openly and honestly. Design teams that favor politeness over candor will rarely produce great work.