Peter Merholz

As UX/Design leaders, perhaps our greatest responsibility is to the people we manage and lead.

The UX/Design Organizational Health Report revealed many factors that affect how healthy a UX/Design team is.

In a recent Thought Partnership session, a VP Design asked for help in thinking through their team's OKRs (Objectives and Key Results).

Recently, a head of design shared with me how their UX metrics work was being taken up by their product management partners, to be placed on their dashboards.

TL; DR: Critique and review are different.

A few years ago, we interviewed Jen Cardello for Finding Our Way, and she shared that her team (UX Research) is peered with "market research, behavioral economics, brand, and advertising research, and customer loyalty" in an independent Insights team.

That Vision Thing About a year ago, I distilled the conversations Jesse and I had been having with design executives on our podcast Finding Our Way into a post titled, "Design leadership is change management."

Thesis Design maturity models are oversimplified frameworks that mask the necessary nuance to understand and develop an organization's ability to get the most out of a Design function.

UX/Design leaders often get caught up in their personal missions, their narratives of change and impact, and believe they just need to "educate", "persuade," "evangelize" their point of view, typically one of customer-centricity and the importance of qual…

Since I've become independent, perhaps the most common request of my time is helping companies develop good career frameworks for their UX teams.

A common challenge for the design leaders I support is identifying metrics.

Over the holiday break, I reviewed the 5 conversations that Jesse and I have conducted with truly senior design executives for our podcast Finding Our Way, looking for lessons that could be distilled and imparted for those who aspire to such roles.

Though the book I co-wrote is titled Org Design for Design Orgs, and, sure, it addresses broader design concerns (communication design, service design, hardware and industrial design, environmental design), it's focused on a kind of design org, specifical…

(this post is a bit of a muddle, but addresses what I see as a crisis in our field, and so I wanted to get these ideas out there, warts and all.)

On a recent episode of Finding Our Way, Jesse and I spoke with Tim Kieschnick.