Executive summary
Problem: Google's internal cybersecurity tools were fragmented and reliant on manual, toilsome processes, creating critical operational risks for Alphabet's infrastructure.
Strategy: I built a global design organization from scratch (scaling 0 to 30) and led the integration of AI to automate threat detection other high stakes workflows.
Outcome: Achieved significant improvements security analysts and other users, maintained 96% team retention since 2019, and unified the approach to cyber defense UX.
In 2019, I was recruited into Google with a mandate that sounded simple on paper, but was staggering in reality: establish the first dedicated UX function within the company's massive Privacy, Safety & Security (PSS) organization. The mission was to "keep everyone safe—at scale". That meant protecting Google and all of Alphabet's massive, ever-growing infrastructure and the personal data of ~4.5 billion users from the world's most sophisticated threat actors, including nation state attacks.
I had parachuted into an organization of thousands of software engineers as the sole UX professional and quickly realized that the organization was suffering from a classic enterprise problem: organic uncoordinated growth. These were world class teams composed of world-leading experts, however their software was described as "borderline unusable." The tooling ecosystem used to defend the internet's most valuable assets was powerful but fragmented, littered with bugs, lacking cohesive user journeys.
These weren't just frustrated users. This was operational risk in a high stakes environment.
Over the next few years, I didn't just design products; I designed an entire organization and scaled from a solo practice to a global team with over 30 professionals. We've transformed the fragmented technical landscape into a well-oiled business machine.
My strategy for building the new design org was based on four key pillars:
2019
2021
2023
2025
UX organization growth
I'm immensely proud of the things I've achieved at Google over the past 7 years, and even more excited for some of the things we have in front of us. These are a few highlights —
