Peter Merholz

What they show

A site organized around three offers: consulting (including thought-partnership coaching for design leaders), training masterclasses, and writing. The signature programs are on design leadership, org design and career architecture. The anchor is his book, Org Design for Design Orgs, and the framing is explicit: proven steps that drive design leadership success, developed through teaching and consulting since the book came out. His co-founding of Adaptive Path and his in-house years (including leading Groupon's design org) are background, not foreground.

Why it works at this level

It's the clearest example in the collection of a leader turning a body of knowledge into a product. Instead of a portfolio of things he designed, the site presents a portfolio of frameworks he's taught, and the book is the case study that proves them. For a Director or VP wondering how the organizational side of their work could ever be shown, this is one answer: write it down as a method, then teach it. The site's restraint helps; it doesn't try to also be a designer's portfolio, which would dilute the authority.

What to steal

If you have a repeatable way of structuring teams, leveling careers or running an org, write it up as a framework with a name; a framework is showable in a way that management isn't. Let one substantial piece of writing anchor the site and point everything else at it.

What I'd change

One thing I'd push on. Every site here is good; this is the note I'd send the author.

Adaptive Path is one of the most influential design consultancies of its era and it's a footnote here, and the older blog at peterme.com holds twenty years of his thinking that the new site doesn't surface. Linking the two would serve readers who want the history.