Org Design for Design Orgs

Chapter 1. Why Design? Why Now?

AS WITH MUCH OF THE ECONOMY, September 2009 was an uncertain time for the technology sector. The markets were mostly recovered after the global financial collapse, but it wasn’t clear if this would sustain or if a double-dip recession would undo the recovery. That month, a corporate acquisition occurred that has ripple effects to this day, though not in any way predicted at the time. Intuit, the leading provider for personal and small business financial management software, paid $170 million to acquire Mint, a service that aggregated all your financial accounts into a single dashboard. Mint had been operating for only 2 years, had 35 employees, and had about 1.5 million users. Revenues supposedly had grown fast, but were never shared.

Most surprising, Mint didn’t own the core aggregation technology—that came from Yodlee. Mint’s innovation was a smooth and delightful user experience on top of that technology, which in turn created a passionate, active, and growing user base. In large part, Mint was acquired for its design, as that was the primary factor contributing to its desirable metrics. This proved to be a lightbulb moment in Silicon Valley, along with the rise of Apple at the time. Mergers and acquisitions activity for design firms and designer-led companies accelerated after 2010,^[1] and every startup and tech company realized they needed a design competency in order to stay competitive.

Silicon Valley is such an idiosyncratic business environment, ...