Transformational organizational leadership

As Head of UX for Cloud Storage at Google, I led design and research across a portfolio of seven enterprise storage services, a multi-billion-dollar annual recurring revenue business. Over my tenure I moved the organization from a legacy UI execution shop into an embedded team of strategic partners, directing strategy, research and execution for 21+ significant user-facing launches. Marrying metrics-driven insight with organizational restructuring, the team delivered an 11-point NPS lift, a 6% CSAT increase, and 100% retention.

The challenge

The scale of Cloud Storage

When I stepped into the role, Google Cloud Storage was GCP’s primary object storage service significant revenue driver, serving dozens of brands that are household names. The organizational model and product development cycle were not positioned to support a portfolio of that scale or technical complexity.

A flat, unsupported team

I inherited StoFE — Storage Front-End UX — a flat, 21-person multidisciplinary team with three critical points of failure.

• —Poor org design. A completely flat reporting structure paired senior, highly demanding PM and engineering partners with a large number of junior Nooglers.
• —Thin leadership bench. With too few design managers and directors, practitioners operated in silos without mentorship, career guidance or professional support.
• —Ailing morale and flight risks. Left isolated in highly ambiguous technical spaces, the team suffered severe burnout, historically low sentiment and multiple critical flight risks.

The support-service trap

Historically the UX group sat beneath the front-end engineering team as a subservient support service. Product Management and Engineering defined all requirements and timelines independently, bringing UX in at the final stage to apply a coat of paint onto predefined, deeply resource-centric experiences. The result was a fragmented experience across services — and a reputation problem.

• —Scathing product feedback. Customers routinely cited GCS for poor ease of use, complicated configurations and wayfinding bottlenecks.
• —The black-box perception. Partners complained that UX went dark for long stretches, or spent its time on foundational research into well-known industry concepts instead of delivering predictable value.

The turnaround

Re-architecting the org

Recognizing that a flat, matrixed team could not drive strategic influence, I took a calculated risk and restructured our entire footprint, proposing that Databases and Storage split into two dedicated UX organizations. The reorg meant voluntarily halving my immediate scope — eight database designers moved to a sibling manager — but it was the step that built real focus and domain expertise for Storage. I moved the team out of the StoFE engineering brand and founded Storage UX as a peer function to UI Engineering and Product Management.

Sourcing local leadership

To operationalize the pod model, I grew a leadership bench and then got out of its way: day-to-day operations, prioritization and partner relationships went directly to the leads, empowering them to make strategic decisions inside their product scopes.

• —Established a Tel Aviv design footprint co-located with core PM and engineering, hiring a senior UX lead and coaching him through the transition to manager.
• —Promoted an internal senior individual contributor to lead the Data Movement team.
• —Hired a senior UXR manager who built the research discipline from zero to four dedicated researchers. (By the way, the best hire of my career. Go Will Seidelman!)

Shifting the project mix

To move the team off reactive, lock-step engineering deadlines, I worked with my truly amazing Engineering Director, Sandeep Singhal, to sponsor a move off of the legacy allocation model in favor of project-based resource pools and a proactive 50/30/20 mix.

Standing up executive interlocks

To destroy the black-box perception, I created a living planning document — the Storage UX Backlog — tracking and prioritizing 50+ projects per semester across all seven services. I then initiated and led a monthly, UX-led executive interlock with our Storage Engineering Director and Group PM Director, where we aligned on long-term roadmaps, coordinated resource planning, surfaced staffing gaps directly to leadership, and showcased the team’s work. For the first time, Storage UX had independent OKRs sitting alongside PA-level OKRs rather than hidden inside engineering roadmaps.

Building the Storage User Voice program

To turn customer pain into funded engineering commitments, I built the Storage User Voice program from scratch. Every quarter my team collected, coded and analyzed thousands of lines of direct end-user comments from HaTS and Listnr, and I presented that quantitative and qualitative picture at monthly VP-level Customer Experience reviews. The executive visibility unblocked engineering resources, letting me co-found the GCS CX Fixit program: with the Interface Engineering team we triaged our CX debt and ran rolling fixit sprints against dozens of long-ignored console usability bugs.

The impact

Portfolio and financial impact

• —NPS lift. GCS Net Promoter Score improved 11 points over two years, climbing from 21 in 2019 to 32 in 2021.
• —CSAT growth. Customer satisfaction rose year over year, from 81% in 2019 to 87% in 2021.
• —Complaint reduction. The CX Fixit program drove a 80% reduction in complaints for GCS’s single most-reported console usability issue.
• —Direct growth. Redesigning a confusing Filestore quota request flow — backlogged for over a year — produced an immediate 34% increase in Filestore instance creation.
• —Strategic headcount. On the proven value of User Voice, I petitioned PA leadership and was granted seven net-new roles, including a dedicated quantitative researcher to scale the metrics framework.
• —Unblocked enterprise deals. Details are NDA.

Organizational health and retention

• —100% retention. Within 18 months of establishing the managed pod model, retention increased 67 points to reach a perfect 100%.
• —Sentiment surges. Double-digit Googlegeist increases: priorities, product excellence and execution +30 points; strategic alignment +36; accessibility practice +52; decision-making speed +36.
• —Manager approval. My people-manager feedback reached a 96% favorable rating by end of 2020, with the team describing an amazingly human and supportive manager who modeled healthy boundaries and psychological safety.