The Emerging Shape of Design Orgs

Design organizations are increasingly expected to contribute to product strategy, but these structures support little more than product delivery. If the team is asked to develop a vision for the future product experience 2-3 years out, how do they get it done?

If you are not evolving your organizational design, it might be an indicator that your product strategy is getting stale. In our experience, most rigid organizational structures are built to create processes for predictability, not successful outcomes.

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

With this in mind, here are the basic steps to organizational design: 1. Figure out what needs to be communicated. Start by listing the most important knowledge and who needs to have it. For example, knowledge of the product architecture must be understood by engineering, QA, product management, marketing, and sales. 2. Figure out what needs to be