Creative and Strategic Leadership in Design Orgs—Super-Senior ICs and the Shadow Strategy Team (3rd in a series on Emerging Shape of Design Orgs), Peter Merholz

This post is meant to be a foundational building block for further thinking on emerging standards in the shape of design organizations.

As a consultant focused on the org design of design orgs, I work across a variety of contexts—established businesses (banks, retail); software as a service (enterprise software); scale-ups (pre-IPO and growing); start-ups. And repeatedly over the past couple of years, I’ve found myself drawing some variation of the following generic digital product... See more

That typical hierarchical org chart does not depict the relationships between different parts of the team.

Leaders of Product Design One of the most important roles in a company is the person or people responsible for the holistic user experience. These leaders must ensure a consistent and effective user experience systemwide. This is sometimes the leader of the product design team, sometimes one of the managers or directors of design, and sometimes a p

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Vision & Strategy: You own the vision, strategy, and roadmap. You know the market, our users, the product, and the competition. You drive alignment: If I ask 5 different people what you’re building and why, I’ll get one answer.

While working on the LVT and MoS, the product people on the team and within the product organization are concurrently developing product blueprints to ensure that over the longer term the team, management, and customers have an understanding of how you intend to evolve your products. Organizational structures will also change as businesses morph fr

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