Google Distributed Workplace

In 2019, Google established a group called Connect to cater to the needs of its employees, referred to as Googlers. This group was divided into specific domains, with the Distributed Workplace domain being the largest. With a team of over 80 cross-disciplinary peers located in NYC and Germany, I was part of a four-person leadership team alongside a Product Manager, Engineering, and Program Manager lead. Our mandate was to enable better connections among Googlers regardless of their location, and our work was intended for internal use as well as for consumer and enterprise Workspace customers.

Despite the unprecedented time in history, we developed a focused team that delivered a strong impact.

Problems

  • Not enough space

    Googlers could not find enough space to meet. This was especially challenging in certain locations or in certain situations, such as last-minute meetings or when traveling.

  • Feeling disconnected

    Googlers were more distributed than ever and felt disconnected to their teams, especially during the pandemic.

  • Poor well-being

    Googlers' work/life balance was disrupted and people were forgetting to treat others as humans. We were all just an image on a screen. Teams were getting burnt out and productivity was difficult.

My role as a Sr. UX Manager

  • Develop Product Strategy

    Partner with my cross-functional leads to define a tangible, impactful high-level roadmap to guide our teams to success.

    Develop and run workshops to ideate and align team members on core problems and new concepts.

  • Build and nurture a healthy team culture

    Leverage well-being check-ins and career growth conversations to ensure team members have what they need to feel comfortable and empowerd to be the best they can be.

  • Create and grow an org

    Create an agile org broken up into teams that resonate with individual skillsets and passions.

    Parter with my cross-functional leads to define and monitor existing team rituals, meetings and review processes.

    Mediate team member disputes and create a clear set of expectations for the team.

  • Mentorship and Coaching

    Share my UX expertise internally and externally to foster the growth of the next generation of product desingers and researchers.

    Teach new employee classes and develop unique workshops around effective feedback.

  • Create a robust research program

    Run workshops to create and align cross functional team membes on north star metrics to ensure the team knows how to validate ideas.

    Develop processes to better understand our problem space and monitor our success or failure against our critical user journeys.

    Collaborate across product teams to understand various research initiatives and become the subject matter expert in this domain.

    Enable my research managers to develop a comprehensive research plan and program, with templates and clear and concise research read-outs.

    Build an agile experimentation process that allows for quick ideation and consistent user feedback.

  • Develop an innovative and diverse design process

    Conduct regular critiques with other UX team members and with cross functional teams

    Run designstorms where multiple designers work together in different domains to get unique perspectives on the same problem

    Leverage existing design systems and build upon them to expedite design and development efforts.

Our Process

Based on the potential scale, the scope of the problems, and team expertise, we divided up the teams and assigned leads.

The Labs platform team would come up with reusable components and styles to use on each project. My team led the development of a style guide to ensure design consistency across our work.

I led the creation of a unique brand that was extensible to the various subteams

Designed an Org

We needed a way to refine the scope of the problem area. So, we used surveys to understand personas and critical user journeys in each of the problem spaces.

I worked with my UX Research manager to create the right studies and then I met with cross product area leads to evanagelize our work and consolidate other research.

Conducted Baseline Research

Then, we ran a Max/Diff survey to prioritize the critical user journeys. We used this as a baseline for all of our work moving forward. Every six months, we would run the same survey and ensure we were improving users' main problems. After two years, we ran more holistic research to capture any new problem areas. I evangelized this work with team leads and with senior UX leadership.

Prioritize the Journeys

Next we broke down the journeys into measurable tasks. We leveraged research insights to consolidate our findings. This made it easy for teams to quickly see where the biggest pain points were and helped them ideate solutions. I am a huge advocate for research bites in lieu of long reports. I prototyped new formats to consolidate research.

Break Down the Journeys

I led a design sprint to align the team around all of the critical user journeys and ideate on solutions together.

Run a design sprint

Next we ran a hackathon to have ENG build some of the ideas we had. The event took one week and involved team members and engineering outside of our team for new perspectives.

I reviewed all entries and ensured they were focused on our pain points and setup validation criteria for our research.

Run a hackathon

Setup an Experimentation Process

I led efforts on the team to design an efficient and effective experimentation process for our teams. We needed a way to quickly align on the right validation criteria and determine the right type of testing required. More complex interactions, like a virtual workspace, required a working prototype. Simpler ones like showing working location in Meet only needed a short description or a mock.

Creating a vision

Once we had enough products and experiments, we mapped out how they could each fit into the lives of our users. I drafted versions of the narrative and directed an animated video. We shared this with senior leadership to get sign-off. This helped maintain momentum with the team and support from directors.

Enhancing an ecosystem

We built upon Google Workspace and added functionality and new products that made life for employees and external users easier. I led efforts to connect ideas together and look for synergy with existing products.

I directed my team to create a modified design system that enabled our teams to quickly iterate on new ideas and standardize the look of our experiments across the Workplace Suite.

We leveraged overlays in Chrome extensions to understand if our ideas resonated with users prior to integrating them natively into the product.

Designing our future

We created new products in areas like Well-being to better align communication expectations. This project was called user manuals. I developed and facilitated the process to validate these ideas.

Creating new products

Seamless integration

We leveraged our Chrome extension framework to integration our tooling, like the user manual preferences into tools like Chat, Gmail, and Calendar.

These tools improved well-being by 30%.

CSAT was always 80%+.

Final Designs

Many of the features were natively integrated into Workspace for external users. Emoji integration was the most popular idea we built.

Our virtual connections tools improved collaboration by 20% and increased a feeling of connectedness by 87%.

Adoption of our tooling internally was 90% within nine months.

We also build new products, like Shortcut that helped employees book meetings on the fly and navigate around the office.

Shortcut had a CSAT of 92% on both iOS and Android.

66% are 28 daily active users

I collaborated with 22 senior leads and ~82 full-time employees across 21 products, and 9 sub-teams across Munich, Sunnyvale, and New York. We build a desk booking system from the ground up within 3 months.

The tool has enabled 160k+ total office visits, during the first year in use, across 86 offices in the Americas, APAC, and EMEA. The CSAT was 92%.

It won the Core Tech Impact Award in 2021.

We also integrated an auto booking tool within Calendar. These tools made an additional 161K of hours of new space per month available for meetings.

What I learned.

A healthy culture is foundational to a team’s success. The pandemic challenged us all in new ways. Collectively, we sometimes got caught up in the work so much that we forgot we were human and three dimensional. Maintaining and building relationships with a distributed team is critical to enable trust and to grow skillsets.

Fail fast and experiment often. There was one experiment that we all got caught up in and had the team work 7 months on, only to find that it didn’t truly resonate with users.