I just finished up 13 years at Google. The past couple of months have been a period of intense reflection. What did I learn at Google? What did I achieve? What do I want to take with me into my new job? What do I want to leave behind? There are countless people, projects, and experiences that shaped me into the designer and leader I am today. I distilled all that reflection down to three lessons that stuck with me.
The power of vision
You can’t get to your destination if you don’t know where you’re going. I worked on 20+ visions over the course of my career at Google. Most of them, nobody asked for. In fact, I often got a lot of pushback on vision. We don’t need to waste time on a pretty vision. We obviously all know what we want to build... Yet, every single vision I worked on created 10x more alignment, got people to dream bigger, and changed the direction we were heading in some meaningful way. And in this AI era, I’m convinced a clear picture of where you want to go is even more essential. See Faster! But Towards What?
When I think about how I got to where I am today, I never had a grand scheme or master plan to get to the top. What got me here was simply imagining better futures and working insanely hard to make those futures a reality.
Don’t ask for permission
When I started at Google, teams were small, there were no reviews, no steerings, no launch bits... in fact, barely any processes at all. It was chaotic, yes, but in a good way. You deeply understood your users, their problems, and you built great products that solved those problems. Sure you had to keep leadership informed of what was happening and you always got feedback (Googlers love leaving comments). But during those glory days, the feedback was almost always go bigger! What if we 10x’ed this? How can we make it a moonshot?... In those early days, you fully owned the product you were building (even as a junior designer), you were expected to deliver great things, and were empowered to do whatever you and your team thought was necessary to make that happen.
I’m glad I grew up in that Google. It gave me a healthy disregard for large company pomp and circumstance. Just do the right thing. We trust you.
As we grew, things started slipping through the cracks, quality went down, people felt less responsible for the overall experience so they just started focusing on their piece. To counteract that, we externalized a lot of that ownership into systems and processes in the name of consistency and quality at scale. I saw designers go from deep ownership of the quality to feeling more like cogs in the machine, just trying to get their piece through the next leadership review, design review, or launch review. They could see the cracks, the seams that didn’t quite fit, and rough edges. They wanted the experience to be more polished and higher quality... but the machine didn’t reward them for that.
With AI, I’m seeing signs of life for that older, more empowered way of working. UX has started fixing bugs nobody asked them to fix. Engineers are touching other teams’ code to make the overall experience better. Product is thinking more holistically again because we can more easily ship larger things.
Together, we’re unstoppable
Lastly, whatever I’ve been able to achieve at Google was always done with the help of all the amazing, talented, and supportive people around me. No one can do this alone. People helped me do more than I thought was possible. I, in turn, helped others do more than they thought was possible. It’s one reason I invest heavily in creating a shared identity and building connections at every level: my leadership team, the larger UX team, my XFN partners, the organization overall, making sure we see ourselves as one vs. the separate teams and identities that make up the org. Those connections, that support, feeling safe to take risks, knowing your team has your back... it’s the only way to do truly great things.
I’m reminded of the proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” I see worrying signs that the AI era is pushing people to focus on the fast part at the expense of going far. We can all do more by ourselves now and it’s leading to more siloed thinking, more fragmented experiences, more finger pointing when something goes wrong... AI makes us think we can do anything and that’s a double-edged sword. It’s both empowering and intoxicating. We’ve spent years building products that allow for effortless collaboration with our peers, each of us supercharging each other’s work. And it’s all seemingly going out the window with AI tools leading us to work in our own bubbles, talking to ourselves, building our own thing, just for us.
I want to go far. I want to reach the destination we dreamed up together, the one we got excited about but weren't sure we could pull off. I want us to take the risks and do what's needed without asking for permission, knowing we have each other's backs. And when we get there, I know it’s going to feel so much better celebrating together.