Podcast: Peter Merholz, Design Executive and Author — How to Design Your Design Org

Peter Merholz is a design executive, consultant, and co-author of 'Org Design for Design Orgs,' widely regarded as the handbook for scaling in-house design teams. He co-founded Adaptive Path (one of the first user experience consultancies) and later ran design at Groupon, OpenTable, and Snagajob. He now embeds inside large companies — Wells Fargo, Ceridian, JPMorgan Chase — to help them scale design, and works as a thought partner to design leaders around the world.

Peter says the first inflection point is somewhere between 7 and 10 people. Below that, a single leader can hold everything in their head; above it, organizational complexity (recruiting, onboarding, professional development, ladders) starts compounding and someone needs to own those operational functions so the design leader can actually lead.

Peter recommends charters when a team hits about 20 people. That's the size where his clients consistently come to him asking 'who are we, actually?' — because up to that point, the team has usually been defined by other people's expectations (often production-level expectations) rather than by its own ambitions.

Because most design teams aren't founded by designers. A founder or PM decides 'we need design,' hires one senior designer, and tells that designer to build out the team. Identity gets inherited from whatever the rest of the org expected design to be — usually wireframes, mocks, and production work. At 20 people, the team has the critical mass to want to define its own role, but also discovers how much of its current identity was assigned to it.

The 2016 book Peter co-authored with Kristin Skinner — still basically the only practical handbook for growing in-house design teams. Peter credits it with being the 'calling card' that has kept him in embedded consulting work for years, and recommends it (along with Chris Avore and Russ Unger's 'Liftoff') as a starting reference for design leaders scaling an org.

Two things. First, embedded work inside companies — he's spent extended time at Wells Fargo, Ceridian, and JPMorgan Chase helping them scale their in-house design organizations. Second, thought partnership with design leaders globally, from eight-person teams to 450-person ones, across startups, tech, and financial services.

A blog-post framework (Google 'define your design team merholz') that he walks leaders of 20-person-plus teams through when they come to him for charter work. It starts by surfacing what the team is currently expected to do, then separates what others expect from what the team wants to own, and uses that gap as the basis for the charter.

He scaled Groupon's design team from about 25 to 60 people, which he describes as one of the most formative professional experiences of his career. That experience is the primary source material for much of what later went into 'Org Design for Design Orgs.'

Adaptive Path was one of the first user experience consultancies, co-founded by Peter and his partners in 2001. Peter spent ten years helping lead the company before moving into in-house leadership roles and eventually to embedded consulting.