Six years on Google Photos and other consumer products, between San Francisco, Singapore, India and New York.
The role
Staff Product Designer, working on Next Billion Users and Google Photos.
What I worked on
I spent the first three years leading new products for the Next Billion Users team. That meant travelling to places like India, interviewing people on the street, and iterating on prototypes in the field, then launching products built for the reality of those markets: connectivity, device speed, language, all of it. Part of that was the default Photos app for Android One devices, designed around the same constraints.
Then I moved to the main Google Photos app, a product with over a billion users, leading much of the sharing side with a large team spread across San Francisco and Sydney.
While I was there I also mentored startups in the Sydney startup ecosystem.
What I took from it
I went deep on process for product development. I leant hard into product management, engineering requirements and business needs, and came out understanding the whole picture rather than just the design seat. I also came out with best practice for building products at scale, from small startups to billion-user products: the process for doing it, what works, and what doesn't.