Google’s product ecosystem is vast and, at the time I joined, fragmented. When it came to how users found, represented, and connected with each other, the experience was inconsistent, often broken.
As head of People & Sharing UX from 2017 to 2020, I grew the team from 3 to 20, operated a 3-in-a-box partnership model with product and engineering leaders, and grounded the team in the Critical User Journey framework as our shared operating language. The mission was to build the foundational people and connection layer that powered every Google product.
People and Connection at Scale
First, unify fragmented identity and profile data into a coherent understanding of a person, which required massive engineering efforts, legal partnership, and earning explicit user trust. Second, experiment directly on flagship product surfaces to meet real user needs in context. Third, standardize solutions as plug-and-play People Primitives for all of Google’s first-party apps, thousands of them.
Each Primitive answered three core questions: who am I, who is this person, how do we connect.
People Card
People Card let Gmail users learn about someone by hovering over their identity disc without disrupting their workflow.
Both followed a consistent information hierarchy grounded in user research: who the person is first, their social graph second, what they do third. Other Primitives included People Sheet, Share Sheet, and Location Sharing, each adapted to the context of its host product.
People Companion
People Companion brought a contextual sidebar into Gmail and Workspace, surfacing people information as users collaborated in real time.
Both followed a consistent information hierarchy grounded in user research: who the person is first, their social graph second, what they do third. Other Primitives included People Sheet, Share Sheet, and Location Sharing, each adapted to the context of its host product.
People Primitives drove a 15% increase in daily active engagement across the products they touched, reaching 2.8 billion monthly active users. The Workspace launch in 2020 saw meaningful growth in both usage and paying businesses.
Google Profile Illustrations
My side job at Google. The problem was specific: 73% of women and non-binary users didn’t feel safe using their real photo as a profile picture. Default monograms were the fallback for the vast majority of users. A monogram is not a person.
I took it on as a parallel initiative with a principled approach: how do you give people meaningful ways to express themselves while respecting safety, privacy, and cultural diversity at Google scale? The creative direction was grounded in building from Google’s brand, focusing on user expression, building for everyone.