Design the Team Before the Product

Most conversations about design focus on the product. The screens. The flows. The features.

Far fewer conversations focus on the team that makes them. Yet the way a design team is structured shapes everything it produces.

Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner make this case in Org Design for Design Orgs. Their book is about building and managing in house design teams, and it treats the organization itself as something to be designed with the same care we give to an interface.

One of their central ideas is a model they call the centralized partnership.

In a fully centralized model, designers sit together and work like an internal agency, taking requests from across the business. In a fully decentralized model, designers are embedded in product teams and report to product or engineering leaders. Both have trade offs. Agency style teams can lose strategic influence. Embedded designers can become isolated, without design leadership or a shared standard of quality.

The centralized partnership combines the strengths of both. Designers report up through a single design leader, but they work day to day in partnership with product teams. They belong to the product they are building and to a design community that helps them grow.

That balance matters. It gives designers context and connection at the same time.

Whether your team has two people or two hundred, there are lessons worth applying.

First, be intentional about structure. Teams that form by accident tend to grow by accident. Decide who designers report to and why.

Second, balance roles and skills. Research, interaction, visual design, content and front end development all contribute. A team built around only one strength will have blind spots.

Third, create a design community. Shared critiques, standards and rituals keep quality consistent across product teams.

Fourth, define career paths. Designers stay and grow when they can see where they are going, whether as managers or as senior individual contributors.

Fifth, give design a seat in early decisions. A team that only receives requests can only polish. A team that helps shape strategy can change outcomes.

Before you design the product, design the team that will build it.

Melvin Conway described this connection in 1968 when he wrote that “organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”

In other words, your product will mirror your organization.

If you want a coherent, thoughtful product, start by building a coherent, thoughtful team. The structure you create today becomes the experience your users feel tomorrow.