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

Seeing design as part of a living system applies equally to more subtle design tasks, like the “design” of guiding ideas. “Organization design is widely misconstrued as moving around boxes and lines,” Bill O’Brien used to say. “The first task of organizational design concerns designing the governing ideas—the purpose, vision, and core values by whi

to help improve team processes. While working at Citrix, some DesignOps side projects included creating checklists to ensure accessibility design, new hire onboarding, or facilitating workshops to help define our team’s critique culture. When I became a design manager at Citrix, DesignOps became a more official part of my work. However, as design m

“circle organization,” re-conceiving traditional top management roles in terms of three overlapping circles of activity: “create demand,” “produce product,” and “provide support.”

The ability to collaborate, manage the increasing complexity of design problems, to design “in context” to their target audiences, and to be accountable for design decisions through measurement transforms designers from “makers of things” to “design strategists.”