CASE STUDY:
Don't Overlook DesignOps
6000+ UXers at Google work across hundreds of product areas, report into dozens of VPs, and span every kind of org design and maturity level
Google needs to raise UX maturity across the company to ensure the business is realizing maximum benefit from customer-centered design, but prior efforts to manage this at scale had uneven results and measuring impact was elusive
- Staffed and launched Google's first service design team focusing on UX employee development & experience
- Defined and delivered a new operational framework from discovery through service delivery for horizontal teams at Google
- Collaborated with global executive leaders to deliver a new UX career framework
- Synthesized insights from dozens of internal research studies to identify Google's #1 development priority across all of UX (6000+ global FTE)
This case study isn't primarily about leading craft; rather, it's about creating the appropriate organizational and operational frameworks required for craft to happen at scale and quality. As a Product Design leader, every role I've been in has required at least as much attention to developing a strong operational structure and rhythm as it has to leading craft, and my role at Google makes it clear why operational rigor is a vital component of a healthy design organization.
I joined the Core UX team at Google for the opportunity to help optimize the largest UX organization in the world, leading a horizontal team tasked with raising UX maturity across the company. When I arrived, the following conditions were present on the team:
- Entire leadership team and nearly half of the staff had recently departed due to burnout and lack of direction (a recurring pattern on the team)
- Team composition was 80% Program Managers, many of whom had never worked in UX organizations prior to joining the team
- Each individual contributor was responsible for their own OKRs with no alignment up to the larger organization and no way to measure success against larger business goals
A major source of stress for the team came from the unsustainable number of programs it was attempting to run: over 160 programs distributed across 8 staff. Indivduals were largely unaware of any work happening outside their own projects or where other team members might intersect with them.
The team had recruited a small army of volunteers from other parts of the company to help with program execution, but this model had proven to be unsustainable and it wasn't surprising that turnover on the team was among the highest at Google.
The team's mission statement at the time: "Help Google UX deliver better products, faster" had never been broken down into guiding themes or focus areas and no user segmentation had been done, so every request - many of which were coming from various VPs and senior leaders - was arguably a P0 per the mission. In the absence of clarity around how the team was best positioned to help, there was no way to justify saying no to anything.
We needed to get UXCC's runaway portfolio under control as a first step just to give people the space to breathe and think, so I worked with the team to capture any existing ad hoc decision making criteria and we created an interim rubric that could be used to immediately start reducing the project burden.
Looking under the hood at the existing 160 programs, many had been paused or were otherwise languishing so there were at least some prioritization calls being made even if only at the individual level. We were able to trim more than half of the portfolio just by formally closing down projects that had never been resourced or had been paused for more than a quarter, again ensuring that stakeholders understood and supported those actions. While this might seem like an obvious move, it was the first time the team felt empowered to say no.
We communicated up to executive sponsors that we needed to make significant changes; the execs were also surprised to hear there were 20 projects and programs per staffer and supported the changes we proposed. With an entirely new leadership team joining and an expectation to redefine the mission it was important to make sure leaders across Google were aligned at each major decision point.
After experiencing positive feedback on our first round of prioritization the team started feeling more confident about stating what we should focus on; we introduced a backlog to hold projects that met our emerging criteria but weren't immediate priorities and this second round reduced the active project load from our starting point of 160 to about 30.
Was it ultimately the correct 30 projects to get us where we wanted to go? In the absence of a clear mission or team-wide objectives to guide our decisions we couldn't yet say for sure, but with a manageable workload and some recent experience thinking about the reasons we'd say yes or no to different opportunities we were ready to begin proper discovery.
With a more realistic project load and new clarity around our users we launched a series of workshops designed to produce an effective team mission to inform long-term focus areas that we'd ensure were aligned with Google's larger business priorities.
There was no existing user segmentation to help start our discovery process, so we started by defining our primary user types, segmenting by career stage, team size, discipline (e.g. UX Design, UX Research, UX Engineering, UX Writing etc.), and geographic regions, among others. As we drilled into different kinds of UX personas it became clear that some segments like discipline groups (e.g. "UX Researchers") had access to a range of support and development programs relating to their knowledge domains, while others -- like UX people managers -- relied almost exclusively on UXCC's support. This work enabled us begin hypothesizing where we had the most opportunity to drive impact for the business.
Measuring success and impact was critical work in defining the next step; UXCC had historically relied on sentiment metrics from company-wide surveys to measure program success, but there was a missing piece between showing improvement in how people felt about their roles and how much they were able to measurably impact the business. Our leaders were clear that they were interested in boosting the impact UXers were having on the business.
When examining all of the data available from various internal research studies [sidebar: far more than I'd ever seen before] we discovered there was a strong correlation between cross-functional relationship health, development velocity, and customer satisfaction scores. The data also suggested UX cross-functional relationships were directly influenced by the level of business acumen UX teams demonstrated, and that business acumen itself was strongly correlated with the size of the local UX organization and the presence (or lack) of UX leaders who were able to model these skills.
As we workshopped the intersection between what the business needed (business-savvy UXers and healthy cross-functional relationships) and what UXCC was best positioned to deliver, our new mission statement emerged as:
which translated into four focus areas where UXCC could uniquely provide value to Google UX:
- Connection: cross-company field work and research synthesis to first surface common needs across the business and identify the most important problems to solve, then driving design and measurement of solutions.
(building bridges, amplifying) - Communication: go/ux was our internal website for all UXers and owned by UXCC, which would integrate with performance management and serve as the single source of truth for building skills, evaluating progress, and measuring impact in business acumen and cross-functional relationships.
(amplifying, and aligning, impacting the business) - Craft: UXCC's programs to support UX learning & development, particularly focusing on UX people managers and leaders given their reach as mentors and coaches.
(amplifying, impacting the business) - Coordination: the operations and Program Management to support all of our focus areas.
(building bridges, aligning)
A horizontal team like UXCC is fundamentally a service design organization; acknowledging it as such provides at least a loose roadmap for both how the team works and how it's optimally staffed. We talked a lot on the team about wanting UXCC to "function more like a product team", and what we actually meant was that we wanted to have a clear North Star, a rigorous discovery process for identifying the most important problems to solve, and an equally rigorous design and delivery process for solving those problems and measuring success.
As mentioned earlier, when I joined the team it was staffed almost entirely with Program Managers, many of whom hadn’t previously worked in product teams or in multidiscipline UX organizations so were unfamiliar with typical discovery and design frameworks. Our new mission and vision workshops helped us refine who we were as a team and what we wanted to focus on delivering for the business, but we needed to next shift our attention to how we were going to get that work done. We tackled two key tasks as this stage:
- We needed to hire for the range of skills we needed to deliver our work (which we’d already begun)
- We needed to focus on the project discovery, design, and delivery pipeline
We reorganized the team into functional disciplines, with Design, Engineering, and Content Strategy under me, a Principal-level UX Researcher to help us make sense of all the incoming sources of data, and a PgM lead to help us both with workstream orchestration and also coordination across all of Google's teams and organizations.
With our newly optimized organization we were ready to introduce discovery best practices via standard design reviews; the goal was to develop a culture of decision making based on data and aligned to organizational priorities from the earliest idea to post-launch measurement.
It can take multiple years to see the impact of systemic organizational change at Google scale, but here's what we can measure in the short term:
- We identified the most critical UX need across Google and delivered a plan to solve it: By engaging in a rigorous discovery process when none had existed before, we surfaced a previously unknown critical gap in Google’s approach to developing UXers: the importance of developing business acumen on UX teams and among leadership. This need surfaced to Sundar Pichai’s leadership team who agreed that it was a top-priority for Google UX in 2023, and we secured a multi-million dollar financial commitment to build development frameworks and programs specifically targeting business acumen.
- We created a scalable service design blueprint built on business-aligned OKRs for horizontal teams at Google: UXCC was the first horizontal discipline team at Google to model ourselves as a service design organization with OKRs aligned to business priorities. When we started publishing our model and approach, over a dozen other horizontal teams at Google adopted our methods and structure within a few months.
- Dramatic reductions in team attrition: the UXCC team churned through staff YoY at alarming rates, but only one person left the team during our restructuring year (7 or more would be common) and survey responses to "I expect to be working on this team next year" increased from 0% in 2021 to 90% in 2022.
CASE STUDY:
Don't Overlook DesignOps
6000+ UXers at Google work across hundreds of product areas, report into dozens of VPs, and span every kind of org design and maturity level
Google needs to raise UX maturity across the company to ensure the business is realizing maximum benefit from customer-centered design, but prior efforts to manage this at scale had uneven results and measuring impact was elusive
- Staffed and launched Google's first service design team focusing on UX employee development & experience
- Defined and delivered a new operational framework from discovery through service delivery for horizontal teams at Google
- Collaborated with global executive leaders to deliver a new UX career framework
- Synthesized insights from dozens of internal research studies to identify Google's #1 development priority across all of UX (6000+ global FTE)
This case study isn't primarily about leading craft; rather, it's about creating the appropriate organizational and operational frameworks required for craft to happen at scale and quality. As a Product Design leader, every role I've been in has required at least as much attention to developing a strong operational structure and rhythm as it has to leading craft, and my role at Google makes it clear why operational rigor is a vital component of a healthy design organization.
I joined the Core UX team at Google for the opportunity to help optimize the largest UX organization in the world: UXCC is the horizontal team tasked with raising UX maturity across the company. When I arrived, the following conditions were present on the team:
- Entire leadership team and nearly half of the staff had recently departed due to burnout and lack of direction (a recurring pattern on the team)
- Team composition was 80% Program Managers, many of whom had never worked in UX organizations prior to joining the team
- Each individual contributor was responsible for their own OKRs with no alignment up to the larger organization and no way to measure success against larger business goals
A major source of stress for the team came from the unsustainable number of programs it was attempting to run: over 160 programs distributed across 8 staff. Indivduals were largely unaware of any work happening outside their own projects or where other team members might be intersecting with them.
The team had recruited a small army of volunteers from other parts of the company to help with program execution, but this model had proven to be unsustainable and it wasn't surprising that turnover on the team was among the highest at Google.
The team's mission statement at the time: "Help Google UX deliver better products, faster" had never been broken down into guiding themes or focus areas and no user segmentation had been done, so every request - many of which were coming from various VPs and senior leaders - was arguably a P0 per the mission. In the absence of clarity around how the team was best positioned to help, there was no way to justify saying no to anything.
We needed to get UXCC's runaway portfolio under control as a first step just to give people the space to breathe and think, so I worked with the team to capture any existing ad hoc decision making criteria and we created an interim rubric that could be used to immediately start reducing the project burden.
Looking under the hood at the existing 160 programs, many had been paused or were otherwise languishing so there were at least some prioritization calls being made even if only at the individual level. We were able to trim more than half of the portfolio just by formally closing down projects that had never been resourced or had been paused for more than a quarter, again ensuring that stakeholders understood and supported those actions. While this might seem like an obvious move, it was the first time the team felt empowered to say no.
We communicated up to executive sponsors that we needed to make significant changes; the execs were also surprised to hear there were 20 projects and programs per staffer and supported the changes we proposed. With an entirely new leadership team joining and an expectation to redefine the mission it was important to make sure leaders across Google were aligned at each major decision point.
After experiencing positive feedback on our first round of prioritization the team started feeling more confident about stating what we should focus on; we introduced a backlog to hold projects that met our emerging criteria but weren't immediate priorities and this second round reduced the active project load from our starting point of 160 to about 30.
Was it ultimately the correct 30 projects to get us where we wanted to go? In the absence of a clear mission or team-wide objectives to guide our decisions we couldn't yet say for sure, but with a manageable workload and some recent experience thinking about the reasons we'd say yes or no to different opportunities we were ready to begin proper discovery.
With a more realistic project load and new clarity around our users we launched a series of workshops designed to produce an effective team mission to inform long-term focus areas that we'd ensure were aligned with Google's larger business priorities.
There was no existing user segmentation to help start our discovery process, so we started by defining our primary user types, segmenting by career stage, team size, discipline (e.g. UX Design, UX Research, UX Engineering, UX Writing etc.), and geographic regions, among others. As we drilled into different kinds of UX personas it became clear that some segments like discipline groups (e.g. "UX Researchers") had access to a range of support and development programs relating to their knowledge domains, while others -- like UX people managers -- relied almost exclusively on UXCC's support. This work enabled us begin hypothesizing where we had the most opportunity to drive impact for the business.
Measuring success and impact was critical work in defining the next step; UXCC had historically relied on sentiment metrics from company-wide surveys to measure program success, but there was a missing piece between showing improvement in how people felt about their roles and how much they were able to measurably impact the business. Our leaders were clear that they were interested in boosting the impact UXers were having on the business.
When examining all of the data available from various internal research studies [sidebar: far more than I'd ever seen before] we discovered there was a strong correlation between cross-functional relationship health, development velocity, and customer satisfaction scores. The data also suggested UX cross-functional relationships were directly influenced by the level of business acumen UX teams demonstrated, and that business acumen itself was strongly correlated with the size of the local UX organization and the presence (or lack) of UX leaders who were able to model these skills.
As we workshopped the intersection between what the business needed (business-savvy UXers and healthy cross-functional relationships) and what UXCC was best positioned to deliver, our new mission statement emerged as:
which translated into four focus areas where UXCC could uniquely provide value to Google UX:
- Connection: cross-company field work and research synthesis to first surface common needs across the business and identify the most important problems to solve, then driving design and measurement of solutions.
(building bridges, amplifying) - Communication: go/ux was our internal website for all UXers and owned by UXCC, which would integrate with performance management and serve as the single source of truth for building skills and evaluating progress across teams and organizations.
(building bridges, amplifying, and aligning) - Craft: UXCC's programs to support UX learning & development, particularly focusing on UX people managers and leaders given their reach as mentors and coaches.
(amplifying, impact on the business) - Coordination: the operations and Program Management to support all of our focus areas.
(building bridges, aligning)
A horizontal team like UXCC is fundamentally a service design organization; acknowledging it as such provides at least a loose roadmap for both how the team works and how it's optimally staffed. We talked a lot on the team about wanting UXCC to "function more like a product team", and what we actually meant was that we wanted to have a clear North Star, a rigorous discovery process for identifying the most important problems to solve, and an equally rigorous design and delivery process for solving those problems and measuring success.
As mentioned earlier, when I joined the team it was staffed almost entirely with Program Managers, many of whom hadn’t previously worked in product teams or in multidiscipline UX organizations so were unfamiliar with typical discovery and design frameworks. Our new mission and vision workshops helped us refine who we were as a team and what we wanted to focus on delivering for the business, but we needed to next shift our attention to how we were going to get that work done. We tackled two key tasks as this stage:
- We needed to hire for the range of skills we needed to deliver our work (which we’d already begun)
- We needed to focus on the project discovery, design, and delivery pipeline
We reorganized the team into functional disciplines, with Design, Engineering, and Content Strategy under me, a Principal-level UX Researcher to help us make sense of all the incoming sources of data, and a PgM lead to help us both with workstream orchestration and also coordination across all of Google's teams and organizations.
With our newly optimized organization we were ready to introduce discovery best practices via standard design reviews; the goal was to develop a culture of decision making based on data and aligned to organizational priorities from the earliest idea to post-launch measurement.
It can take multiple years to see the impact of systemic organizational change at Google scale, but here's what we can measure in the short term:
- We identified the most critical UX need across Google and delivered a plan to solve it: By engaging in a rigorous discovery process when none had existed before, we surfaced a previously unknown critical gap in Google’s approach to developing UXers: the importance of developing business acumen on UX teams and among leadership. This need surfaced to Sundar Pichai’s leadership team who agreed that it was a top-priority for Google UX in 2023, and we secured a multi-million dollar financial commitment to build development frameworks and programs specifically targeting business acumen.
- We created a scalable service design blueprint built on business-aligned OKRs for horizontal teams at Google: UXCC was the first horizontal discipline team at Google to model ourselves as a service design organization with OKRs aligned to business priorities. When we started publishing our model and approach, over a dozen other horizontal teams at Google adopted our methods and structure within a few months.
- Dramatic reductions in team attrition: the UXCC team churned through staff YoY at alarming rates, but only one person left the team during our restructuring year (7 or more would be common) and survey responses to "I expect to be working on this team next year" increased from 0% in 2021 to 90% in 2022.
CASE STUDY:
Don't Overlook DesignOps
6000+ UXers at Google work across hundreds of product areas, report into dozens of VPs, and span every kind of org design and maturity level
Google needs to raise UX maturity across the company to ensure the business is realizing maximum benefit from customer-centered design, but prior efforts to manage this at scale had uneven results and measuring impact was elusive
- Staffed and launched Google's first service design team focusing on UX employee development & experience
- Defined and delivered a new operational framework from discovery through service delivery for horizontal teams at Google
- Collaborated with global executive leaders to deliver a new UX career framework
- Synthesized insights from dozens of internal research studies to identify Google's #1 development priority across all of UX (6000+ global FTE)
This case study isn't primarily about leading craft; rather, it's about creating the appropriate organizational and operational frameworks required for craft to happen at scale and quality. As a Product Design leader, every role I've been in has required at least as much attention to developing a strong operational structure and rhythm as it has to leading craft, and my role at Google makes it clear why operational rigor is a vital component of a healthy design organization.
I joined the Core UX team at Google for the opportunity to help optimize the largest UX organization in the world: UXCC is the horizontal team tasked with raising UX maturity across the company. When I arrived, the following conditions were present on the team:
- Entire leadership team and nearly half of the staff had recently departed due to burnout and lack of direction (a recurring pattern on the team)
- Team composition was 80% Program Managers, many of whom had never worked in UX organizations prior to joining the team
- Each individual contributor was responsible for their own OKRs with no alignment up to the larger organization and no way to measure success against larger business goals
A major source of stress for the team came from the unsustainable number of programs it was attempting to run: over 160 programs distributed across 8 staff. Indivduals were largely unaware of any work happening outside their own projects or where other team members might be intersecting with them.
The team had recruited a small army of volunteers from other parts of the company to help with program execution, but this model had proven to be unsustainable and it wasn't surprising that turnover on the team was among the highest at Google.
The team's mission statement at the time: "Help Google UX deliver better products, faster" had never been broken down into guiding themes or focus areas and no user segmentation had been done, so every request - many of which were coming from various VPs and senior leaders - was arguably a P0 per the mission. In the absence of clarity around how the team was best positioned to help, there was no way to justify saying no to anything.
We needed to get UXCC's runaway portfolio under control as a first step just to give people the space to breathe and think, so I worked with the team to capture any existing ad hoc decision making criteria and we created an interim rubric that could be used to immediately start reducing the project burden.
Looking under the hood at the existing 160 programs, many had been paused or were otherwise languishing so there were at least some prioritization calls being made even if only at the individual level. We were able to trim more than half of the portfolio just by formally closing down projects that had never been resourced or had been paused for more than a quarter, again ensuring that stakeholders understood and supported those actions. While this might seem like an obvious move, it was the first time the team felt empowered to say no.
We communicated up to executive sponsors that we needed to make significant changes; the execs were also surprised to hear there were 20 projects and programs per staffer and supported the changes we proposed. With an entirely new leadership team joining and an expectation to redefine the mission it was important to make sure leaders across Google were aligned at each major decision point.
After experiencing positive feedback on our first round of prioritization the team started feeling more confident about stating what we should focus on; we introduced a backlog to hold projects that met our emerging criteria but weren't immediate priorities and this second round reduced the active project load from our starting point of 160 to about 30.
Was it ultimately the correct 30 projects to get us where we wanted to go? In the absence of a clear mission or team-wide objectives to guide our decisions we couldn't yet say for sure, but with a manageable workload and some recent experience thinking about the reasons we'd say yes or no to different opportunities we were ready to begin proper discovery.
With a more realistic project load and new clarity around our users we launched a series of workshops designed to produce an effective team mission to inform long-term focus areas that we'd ensure were aligned with Google's larger business priorities.
There was no existing user segmentation to help start our discovery process, so we started by defining our primary user types, segmenting by career stage, team size, discipline (e.g. UX Design, UX Research, UX Engineering, UX Writing etc.), and geographic regions, among others. As we drilled into different kinds of UX personas it became clear that some segments like discipline groups (e.g. "UX Researchers") had access to a range of support and development programs relating to their knowledge domains, while others -- like UX people managers -- relied almost exclusively on UXCC's support. This work enabled us begin hypothesizing where we had the most opportunity to drive impact for the business.
Measuring success and impact was critical work in defining the next step; UXCC had historically relied on sentiment metrics from company-wide surveys to measure program success, but there was a missing piece between showing improvement in how people felt about their roles and how much they were able to measurably impact the business. Our leaders were clear that they were interested in boosting the impact UXers were having on the business.
When examining all of the data available from various internal research studies [sidebar: far more than I'd ever seen before] we discovered there was a strong correlation between cross-functional relationship health, development velocity, and customer satisfaction scores. The data also suggested UX cross-functional relationships were directly influenced by the level of business acumen UX teams demonstrated, and that business acumen itself was strongly correlated with the size of the local UX organization and the presence (or lack) of UX leaders who were able to model these skills.
As we workshopped the intersection between what the business needed (business-savvy UXers and healthy cross-functional relationships) and what UXCC was best positioned to deliver, our new mission statement emerged as:
which translated into four focus areas where UXCC could uniquely provide value to Google UX:
- Connection: cross-company field work and research synthesis to first surface common needs across the business and identify the most important problems to solve, then driving design and measurement of solutions.
(building bridges, amplifying) - Communication: go/ux was our internal website for all UXers and owned by UXCC, which would integrate with performance management and serve as the single source of truth for building skills, evaluating progress, and measuring impact in business acumen and cross-functional relationships.
(amplifying, aligning, impacting the business) - Craft: UXCC's programs to support UX learning & development, particularly focusing on UX people managers and leaders given their reach as mentors and coaches.
(amplifying, impacting the business) - Coordination: the operations and Program Management to support all of our focus areas.
(building bridges, aligning)
A horizontal team like UXCC is fundamentally a service design organization; acknowledging it as such provides at least a loose roadmap for both how the team works and how it's optimally staffed. We talked a lot on the team about wanting UXCC to "function more like a product team", and what we actually meant was that we wanted to have a clear North Star, a rigorous discovery process for identifying the most important problems to solve, and an equally rigorous design and delivery process for solving those problems and measuring success.
As mentioned earlier, when I joined the team it was staffed almost entirely with Program Managers, many of whom hadn’t previously worked in product teams or in multidiscipline UX organizations so were unfamiliar with typical discovery and design frameworks. Our new mission and vision workshops helped us refine who we were as a team and what we wanted to focus on delivering for the business, but we needed to next shift our attention to how we were going to get that work done. We tackled two key tasks as this stage:
- We needed to hire for the range of skills we needed to deliver our work (which we’d already begun)
- We needed to focus on the project discovery, design, and delivery pipeline
We reorganized the team into functional disciplines, with Design, Engineering, and Content Strategy under me, a Principal-level UX Researcher to help us make sense of all the incoming sources of data, and a PgM lead to help us both with workstream orchestration and also coordination across all of Google's teams and organizations.
With our newly optimized organization we were ready to introduce discovery best practices via standard design reviews; the goal was to develop a culture of decision making based on data and aligned to organizational priorities from the earliest idea to post-launch measurement.
It can take multiple years to see the impact of systemic organizational change at Google scale, but here's what we can measure in the short term:
- We identified the most critical UX need across Google and delivered a plan to solve it: By engaging in a rigorous discovery process when none had existed before, we surfaced a previously unknown critical gap in Google’s approach to developing UXers: the importance of developing business acumen on UX teams and among leadership. This need surfaced to Sundar Pichai’s leadership team who agreed that it was a top-priority for Google UX in 2023, and we secured a multi-million dollar financial commitment to build development frameworks and programs specifically targeting business acumen.
- We created a scalable service design blueprint built on business-aligned OKRs for horizontal teams at Google: UXCC was the first horizontal discipline team at Google to model ourselves as a service design organization with OKRs aligned to business priorities. When we started publishing our model and approach, over a dozen other horizontal teams at Google adopted our methods and structure within a few months.
- Dramatic reductions in team attrition: the UXCC team churned through staff YoY at alarming rates, but only one person left the team during our restructuring year (7 or more would be common) and survey responses to "I expect to be working on this team next year" increased from 0% in 2021 to 90% in 2022.
