I worked at Google for seven formative years.
For a new college graduate, I don't think there's any better environment than a big company full of smart people. You get to work on so many types of design problems, meet people at the top of their craft, while impacting billions of people with your work.
I learned skills and met incredibly talented people at Google that set the foundation for the rest of my career.
Google Drive
I started as a UX Engineer on the Google Drive team in Sydney, Australia. I shipped several features for the Android app (file organization, tablet, and search experiences), and was part of the initial wave of Google apps that rolled out Material Design 1.0. I also worked on growth projects to retain churning users.
I also collaborated with teams across G Suite (known as Google Apps and Workspace at the time). I designed dashboarding features for Google Sheets and a file previewer for Gmail that remains unchanged 8+ years later.
Google Maps
I joined the Google Maps team in 2016 and worked on public transportation and commute features. My team was focused on growing daily active usage, so we built several features to deliver daily notifications to transit commuters.
A lot is written about Google in the 2020s, and how its culture has changed. Many of my friends at Google have moved on too, so I don't have any insider knowledge into what's going on there.
But Google was always a big place with infinite possibility and the option to choose whichever path you wanted, as long as you seeked it out. I'll be forever grateful to Google and all the opportunities it presented me, and how much it and the people there contributed to my growth as a designer and teammate.
↑ Scroll to top