Team growth
Working within our means
Role UX Manager | Responsibilities Leadership, strategy, cross-functional alignment, advocacy, resource management, career development
TL;DR
An emerging product area with a small team required my leadership, diligence, and creativity to address resource constraints while still delivering huge value to the business.
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My team started as a UX Designer, Motion Designer duo, tasked with laying the foundation for an emerging business in a critical area of growth for YouTube Ads. Given the size and level of the team I rolled up my sleeves to take on a senior lead role in guiding the work, grooming the discipline, and managing up.
Due to the speculative nature of the product area, resourcing was tight and required my expertise in leadership, creative direction and stakeholder management to deliver high quality work with a small team. Beyond digging in and designing concepts and flows to pass on to my junior UXD, I spent a lot of time working with my leadership team on understanding the critical, and unique role, my team was undertaking.
Specifically, the motion design role was operating as a single entity creative agency. Unlike most other motion designers at Google, who were developing assets for within a product, this work was the product. It required a specialized set of skills—concepting, art direction, storyboarding, prototyping, animation, video & audio editing, and deep knowledge of internal technologies that transformed After Effects output into dynamic video ads.
The ideal might have been to hire someone full-time to join the team but this was not an option given headcount constraints. I began looking internally for someone interested in pitching-in. After exhausting my internal search for 20% support, I crafted a business rationale outlining the nature of the role, its unique nature, and the criticality it served in our products success.
I presented this rationale to cross-functional leadership to get buy-in for auxiliary budget to hire a team of contractors. I was successful in securing budget from my product team to hire 3 contractors for one year. This allowed my full-time motion designer to solve two challenges: offloading more basic production tasks, and having a “studio staff” to ideate with and come up with a wider set of options in the exploration phases.
Looking back
Thinking outside-the-box and exploring all available options proved invaluable in accelerating the team’s velocity and creative diversity. As a result we were able to meet our target dates while delivering a greater number of video ad templates that we had signed up for in our OKRs.
From a career growth perceptive, it paid huge dividends in creating a leadership opportunity for my motion designer that ultimately led to their promotion.
In the years that would follow, I continued to gain support from my leadership team on securing contractor and vendor budget. Through continued leadership I was ultimately successful in securing full-time headcount approval.
Without my diligence and creativity our team would have been significantly slower to achieve our goals and grow this emerging business opportunity for Google.