Brave UX: Peter Merholz - Demystifying Design Leadership

Peter Merholz demystifies design leadership 🔮, openly shares the ups and downs of a trail-blazing design career 🔥, and how we can keep design “weird” without getting fired 👽.

Highlights include:

⭐ What is the fundamental job of the designer leader?
⭐ Why do design leaders find it difficult to figure out what their job is?
⭐ What advice did Obi Wan give Luke that design leaders need to hear?
⭐ Why are you a design pragmatist and not an idealist?
⭐ What do design leaders need to know about politics and relationships?

#DesignLeadership #UX #UXDesign #AdaptivePath #BraveUX

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Who is Peter Merholz?

Peter is the Founder and Principal at Humanism at Scale, the consulting practice he started in 2019 to amplify the practices and potential of design teams ⚡ by shaping design organisations and bolstering design leadership 💪.

Before founding Humanism at Scale, Peter was the VP of Design at Snagajob 👩‍💻, where he oversaw design for both product and marketing. Peter has also held positions such as Senior Director of Design at Jawbone, VP of Global Design at Groupon 🎟️ and VP of User Experience at Inflection.

But it is his role and the almost 11 years he invested as a Co-Founder and the Head of Design Practice of Adaptive Path - then the world’s leading UX strategy and UX design firm 🔥 - that he is perhaps best known for.

In 2016, Peter co-authored “Org Design for Design Orgs” 📘 with Kristin Skinner, which was the first book to address building and managing effective in-house design teams.

And, last millennia, Peter coined the term blog 😮. How cool is that!?

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Find Peter here:

Peter’s book:

Org Design for Design Orgs - Building and Managing In-House Design Teams:

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00:00 Start
00:38 Peter’s introduction
02:04 Were you joking when you invented the term blog?
03:29 What’s surprised you the most about inventing the term blog?
05:14 What is special about Cloyne Court at UC Berkley?
08:14 Do you attribute any of your approach to design to your time at Cloyne Court?
09:46 What drove you to get a job as a young teenager and how did that serve you?
11:50 Why did you leave Adaptive Path and was it a hard decision?
16:41 How did you feel after you left Adaptive Path?
18:29 What is broken about design consulting?
20:43 What rough edges did you have to round-off going from owner to in-house?
22:40 How do you remind yourself of the importance of listening?
24:16 What role does the dominant culture of extroversion play in influencing leadership styles?
26:03 What is the fundamental job of the designer leader?
30:57 Do you need to provide more cover for direct reports the further up the ladder you go?
33:29 Why do design leaders find it difficult to figure out what their job is?
34:56 Did you have any doubt going from a consultant to an in-house design leader?
38:24 Back to… Why do design leaders find it difficult to work out what their job is?
41:31 What is the lack of coaching in organisations symptomatic of?
45:46 What advice did Obi Wan give Luke that design leaders need to hear?
47:02 What types of people are not cut out for a career as a design manager?
50:37 Why is it important for design leaders to grow their business skills?
53:16 Why are you a design pragmatist and not an idealist?
57:16 How do you judge which battles are worth fighting and which aren’t?
01:00:22 What do design leaders need to know about politics and relationships?
01:03:14 Is design an ends or a means?
01:04:25 How can designers ‘keep design weird’ without getting fired?
01:08:42 Closing out the show - Thanks, Peter!

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Hosted by Brendan Jarvis:

[ianbabelon]

Two fundamental take-aways from my end: 1) everyone is pretty much figuring out their job as they go along -- i.e. 'winging it' (which does not preclude that one may somehow get good at one's job) 2) the corporate emphasis on shareholder value and profitability does not place humanism and in-house training and peer-support as a priority, which helps to explain point 1. In such context, I feel I can more readily accept that imposter syndrome is optional rather than a must-have. That is possibly one of the greatest promises of humanist endeavours to let quality shine forth, because there a timeless quality about good design, whether such quality is actually engineered, manufactured and reaped sustainably.