0-1 Platform Vision
& Execution
As a tenured UX leader for Google Cloud, I have become known for turning ambiguity into action, operational excellence, healthy collaboration and team culture. In 2024, I was recruited by senior leadership to lead some of Cloud’s most complex and critical cross-platform innovation programs.
“Tobi is particularly strong at managing through ambiguity, bringing structure and forward motion to problems that do not yet have a clear shape. She builds trust quickly, and always listens genuinely.”
Principal Product Design Lead
As the principal lead, I have successfully led four 0–1 initiatives:
- Cloud Hub — As Product Design Lead, I shaped the work of 194 cross-functional partners for the 0–1 definition, design and launch of this dashboard suite centralizing data from 41 APIs. 4M monthly active users. Earned the Customer Empathy Award, presented by Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud.
↓ Deep Dive - Mainframe Modernization with Gemini — As Product Design Lead, I owned the end-to-end product strategy and design for this new AI-driven mainframe code modernization suite. Built in direct partnership with Principal Engineers and Google DeepMind, early releases have earned 4+ new enterprise engagements.
↓ Deep Dive - AI Trust & Agency — Founder and hands-on lead for our AI risk framework guidelines, trust patterns and multi-agent app that internal teams use to ship trustworthy AI features. My public writing on AI Trust & Agency has reached over 140,000 readers.
- AI Native & GenUI — As overall Design Lead for multiple experimental workstreams exploring generative UI and AI-first Cloud console vision, I led the Cloud Console’s first generative UI proof of concept: interfaces assembled in response to a user’s intent rather than drawn in advance.
Cloud Hub
Executive Overview
I led the zero-to-one definition, design, and launch of Cloud Hub, Google Cloud’s first AI-ready dashboarding system for Operator and SRE roles. Collaborated closely with senior executives and 194 cross-functional partners across 9 teams to unify fragmented application metrics from 41 APIs into a single, customer-loved experience.
By establishing a highly collaborative team culture and spearheading a living interactive prototype, we successfully aligned senior leadership, secured critical approvals, and unblocked the engineering roadmap.
The April 2025 launch at Google Cloud Next was celebrated across the organization, earning our team the prestigious Customer Empathy Award presented by Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.
Context: Centralizing the Complex Operator Workspace
Operator and SRE users in high-maturity cloud environments manage thousands of scattered resources across project boundaries. Historically, trying to understand overall application health, cost, and security posture meant navigating a complex maze of disjointed console views and individual product tools.
To solve this, Google Cloud launched Cloud Hub in 2025 as a centralized, unified console that acts as a single pane of glass for real-time application troubleshooting and resource optimization.
Cross-Platform Product Design Leadership
I was the overall Product Design lead for Cloud Hub, exploring early vision prototypes with a “pace car” team of designers and researchers. Leading this core team, I established key concepts and aligned with senior leadership.
Once the concepts were locked, two extraordinary partner program managers shaped our operational model and team RACI of 194 cross-functional partners across 9 teams.
From start to finish, 0–1, Cloud Hub took 6 months. I led the following efforts in order to keep teams aligned and deliver this ambitious enterprise program on this tight timeline:
- Living Design Prototype — To bring our shared vision to life, I led the core team to shape and keep up-to-date our interactive prototype, our single source of truth.
- Product Experience Document — I operated as the overall Product Management lead, authoring large portions of the keystone Product Experience Document, and coordinating contributions from front line Product Managers.
- XFN Roadmap & Priority Alignment — Working with our Program Managers, I coordinated closely with stakeholders from 9 separate teams, aligning work with executive stakeholders. My due diligence on the Cloud Hub roadmap earned me a peer bonus from our Senior Engineering Manager.
AI Mainframe Modernization
Executive Overview
Under my Product Design leadership, I drove the design and product experience strategy to turn Google Cloud’s Mainframe Modernization Platform from an ambiguous technical capability into two successful products: the Mainframe Assessment Tool, for AI-driven application discovery and grouping from COBOL and other mainframe-native languages, and Dual Run, a code management system.
Context: Mainframes in the Age of AI
Enterprise mainframes represent a massive, deeply entrenched segment of the global economy: they process 30 billion transactions daily and house 80% of the world’s corporate data. Decades-old mainframe systems are commonly responsible for enterprise firms’ most critical workloads, and consist of millions of lines of undocumented COBOL code.
Despite high demand to migrate these workloads, enterprise customers frequently fail in their modernization attempts. Often referred to as spaghetti code, mainframe-native languages like COBOL are notoriously tricky and risky to modernize.
To solve this, Google Cloud initiated the Google Mainframe Modernization Platform — a suite of products that uses AI to help sort through legacy code, analyze dependencies, and compare production outputs to facilitate safe, zero-downtime cloud migration.
What I Did: 0–1 Product Design Leadership
I was the Product Design Lead for the Mainframe Modernization Platform, establishing clarity and direction through my keystone Product Experience Document, customer journey maps, user flows, working prototypes, research program and the design system.
By partnering deeply with my world-class engineering and subject matter expert squads, I designed and validated the vision concepts and roadmaps for Mainframe Assessment Tool and Dual Run. Together, we translated dense legacy concepts — such as JCL pipelines, COBOL copybooks, VSAM file sets, and EBCDIC character encoding — into intuitive, contemporary web-based mental models.
My leadership and structure enabled a streamlined onboarding for the incoming Group Product Manager, nine months after I started. Together — with the talented UX team who followed — we guided the work of a 20+ person cross-functional team through the successful launch of two platform products: the Mainframe Assessment Tool, for AI-driven application discovery and grouping from COBOL and other mainframe-native languages, and Dual Run, a code management system.
Results: Unlocking Market Share through Customer-Centered Design
Our unified, customer-driven approach successfully translated highly complex backend operations into an elegant, user-centric product experience: