GOOGLE · DESIGNER-IN-RESIDENCE · 6 YEARS
Changing how people think together, not just how often they meet.
How might we build a real innovation practice inside one of the world's most engineered organizations, where the actual problem is not a lack of intelligence, but a near-complete absence of thinking together?
2,000+
participants across 7 countries
of a 3,000-person organization participated in the Google-wide Doctors Without Borders initiative
48%
of leadership summit attendees said they learned something that would make them a better leader
77%
committed to leading differently after the “In the Pocket” summit
70%
The situation
Google had a collaboration problem it did not know it had. The culture had named global video calls "collaboration." People from offices across seven countries were meeting together. They were not thinking together. Brilliant people, deep in silos of expertise, defaulting to what they already knew, requesting features when what they actually needed was a fundamentally different relationship to the problems in front of them.
There was a deeper gap too: the distance between what leadership believed users needed and what users actually experienced. Surveys and feature requests had created the feeling of insight without the reality of it. One of the highest-voted employee requests was the ability to respond to a support ticket without reopening it. Leadership saw a feature gap. The real issue was something else entirely.
That request was not about a button. It was a signal that employees wanted to deliver genuine concierge-level service to high-value clients, and the system was blocking them. The feature was a symptom. The need was about dignity in service. That kind of distinction, between what people ask for and what they actually need, shaped every project I led at Google.
I was hired into a role that had not existed at Google before. No playbook, no team, no defined scope. Two of the most senior executives in the organization questioned whether the headcount should be used for someone who fit a more recognizable box. I built the case for the work by doing the work.
✹
What I owned
Everything from vision to execution: curriculum design, facilitation, brand, partner relationships, participant experience, user research, and the ongoing argument for why this kind of work deserved a seat inside an engineering-first culture.
I operated as creative director, thought partner, researcher, trainer, and project lead, often simultaneously. My mandate was not fixed. Sometimes I was building entirely new initiatives I had uncovered through frontline work with employees. Sometimes I was thrown into a tangled project someone else had started and left. I never worked the same way twice, and that was the point.
Budget and scope were earned, not given. Every program had to prove itself before the next one could grow.
✱
The constraints
An engineering culture that trusted what it could measure and was skeptical of what it could not. Leadership relying on surveys and feature requests in place of real user understanding. Global scale with genuine local complexity: what landed in an immersive experience in Hollywood required significant redesign before it could work in Japan, Singapore, or with the APAC team building toward Singapore Airlines.
A constant tension between what leadership wanted, measurable outputs, and what real transformation required, space for uncertainty and the willingness to not know the answer at the start.
❉
The calls I made
I pushed for live, in-person user research at a time when leadership believed surveys gave them a clear picture of frontline reality. The Cases tool was used daily by most of gTech. The research session I designed and led brought teams into direct contact with actual user experience, not reported experience. It changed what the team built.
For the 'In the Pocket' Leadership Summit, I made an unconventional choice: I brought in musicians as the creative lens for leadership development. The idea was that the dynamics of a great band, how different people lead at different moments, how a group listens and responds in real time, mapped directly to what 140 senior managers needed to understand about leading in complex organizations. The result was 97 leadership experiments, with 77% of participants reporting they had learned something that would make them better leaders, and 70% committed to leading differently.
Following this programming, gTech Publishers' Googlegeist innovation score came in higher than GBO and Google overall. That score was not the goal. It was the evidence.
The science of play was embedded throughout all of it. Every program was designed to activate the creative and collaborative states that come from genuine play, even when nobody in the room called it that.
I also built outward. I led the largest Google-wide coordinated volunteer initiative in partnership with Doctors Without Borders and GooglersGive: seven simultaneous CSI:Labs, drawing 48% participation across a 3,000-person organization. Googlers used their actual technical skills to do real work in the world. In Detroit, 30 gTech Publishers ran a three-day design sprint for the Detroit Fire Department that produced a prototype for AED mapping, using big data to identify gaps in defibrillator coverage across the city. This was not a day cleaning up a park. It was Google-scale expertise applied to a real public safety problem. The skills those Googlers developed came back inside the organization as genuine innovation capacity.
The two senior executives who had questioned the value of my role at hiring eventually came to my desk asking for transformation support within their own teams. The work had simply taken time to become undeniable to people whose frame of reference was engineering outputs and headcount efficiency.
✹
What changed
Over six years: programs across 7 countries, 2,000+ participants, growth from a single 300-person division to a 3,000-person organization. The Startups to Scaleups course, developed from scratch and scaled globally through a train-the-trainer model. A women's leadership summit that grew from 50 to 500 participants. Immersive experiences in Hollywood, Detroit, and Japan. A Google-wide social impact initiative that set a new standard for what Googler volunteer work could accomplish. A collaboration with the Stanford d.school that produced vomo.co, a prototype enabling screen-free content consumption for vision-impaired readers.
The role created as an experiment became a permanent, expanding function. The work earned its own mandate.
✺
What this unlocked
Most organizations do not have a creativity problem. They have a practice problem. They know that thinking differently matters. They do not have the structures, the rituals, or the shared muscle memory to do it together. Google was where I learned to design for that at real scale, inside a culture that would not take it on faith.
It also sharpened something I bring to every project: the discipline of hearing what is being asked, understanding what is actually needed, and building toward the thing underneath without losing the people who have to make the journey with you.