Leadership
Building a business
Role UX Manager | Responsibilities Leadership, strategy, designer, creative direction, cross-functional alignment, career development
TL;DR
The growth of advertising on YouTube is key to its ongoing dominance in a highly competitive space. In order to achieve this growth, an entirely new product area was created around creative solutions for advertiser at scale. These included tools for creation of new ads and the enhancement of existing ones. Under my leadership, our team developed a suite of manual and AI-driven tools serving millions of advertisers and building a highly profitable business for Alphabet.
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In June 2018 I joined Google to lead design for a highly nascent and speculative space in video ad creation for YouTube. The charter for this product area was to aid advertisers (and their agencies) in the development & scale of video ad creation to drive greater campaign success.
This was achieved through building tools and services (both manual & automated) that ease barriers to entry, lower production budgets, streamline process & efficiency, and improve collaboration.
A fresh start
When I joined, I inherited a small, multidisciplinary team from the last remaining founder of a company that Google had purchased a few years prior. Through founder attrition and organizational restructuring the cross-functional team, including UX, was trying to regain its identity and calling. I immediately got to work to understand the UX and product culture, where deficiencies existed and where UX could play a more powerful role in shaping a vision for the team’s mission, work and culture.
Goal #1 was to bring more visibility for the role of UX. This came in the form of hosting weekly design reviews with our cross-functional partners to publicly share concepts, discuss new ideas, evaluate possible solutions against business goals and available/emergent technology.
In addition, I created rituals for PM & Eng to engage in a user-centered mindset—weekly working sessions to go deep on our users; who they are, how and where they engage our products, what they need & value. Through the partnership with my UXR lead we established greater visibility across the team by including our partners in research planning and session participation. The impact of this was a significant increase in user empathy and buy-in for UX solutions that address key areas of opportunity and user pain points.
One other key area I focused my attention on was process. The cross-functional team in many ways was still operating like a very small startup but that came with challenges working within a massive company like Google. I came to Google having worked hard to shape processes into my team’s work in my past roles and knew I could impart some influence on how we worked and each become a force-multiplier for one another. I also saw first-hand in previous roles that when individuals are empowered to shape a team’s direction, together as a team, it brings with it a great sense of ownership, responsibility and accountability—as individuals but more importantly to each other…as a team.
Ambiguous & ambitious
The team had big, ambitious plans to transform the video creation landscape for advertisers across the full spectrum of scale—Mom & Pop to Fortune 500. Across this spectrum is a diverse set of users with very different needs & goals. Additionally, these users are served by a distributed set of tools & platforms that further complicate the challenges we faced.
Most of my efforts were spent working with leadership (Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Legal) to drive alignment on a shared vision for how to create a scalable suite of tools that could live as standalone solutions or fully integrated into existing workflows.
This required working across multiple, large organizations (YouTube, Display360, Google Ads) and with teams ranging from 8 to 80+ where I led the them to; align disparate business objectives, shape resource and capacity planning, set & evaluate OKRs, and establish achievable and executable roadmaps.
On the design side, I led my team to excel in our craft. To be more strategic thinkers, drive product requirements. Evolve design systems & patterns, deepen our user insights, develop and align personas, understand tech constraints of tool integration. All while navigating a rapidly evolving technology and regulatory landscape.
Putting it all together
The vision to build a suite of tools for advertisers at scale has come to life as a system of creation and enhancement products weaved together through countless hours, by countless people working together on a shared Northstar.
What started as a single tool that allows small business owners to create video ads with nothing more than a few images and some marketing text has grown into a collection of products serving a spectrum of users and user cases…solutions for large advertisers that use AI to assemble ads based on brand, asset and campaign signals. AI that transforms ads from landscape to portrait. Automation that edits long-form ads into shorter derivatives. AI that analyzes an ad for creative best-practices and guides suggested improvements. Tools for voice-over, dubbing… and the list goes on.
Together these solutions represent a massive amount of growth and video ad adoption for Google. They also illustrate Google’s strength in AI and how it can be used to provide user value and efficiency within its most profitable business—Google Ads.
I led the team through this multi-year journey by upleveling the UX craft and building relationships & alignment across organizations—critical in garnering buy-in for product direction, resourcing and headcount allocation.
Looking back
What began as a small, but mighty, UX team charging head-first into the unknown has 10x’d its influence and impact, all while developing greater UX culture, skills, and individual career growth. The path was not easy or smooth to say the least. It was challenged by limited resourcing, attrition, reorgs, COVID-19, and organizational size and bureaucracy.
I take pride in being a part of this experimental journey that has grown into a significant piece of the YouTube Ads strategy. It speaks volumes about the hard work and creativity of all involved and their dedication and commitment to one another.
What gives me the greatest source of pride is working with, and mentoring, a talented and passionate team of designers and getting to know them as people. Understanding what brings them joy at work and at home. Creating a space for inclusion and growth. Lastly, being honored to support the majority of them through promotions and achieve their career goals.