I’m Mandy - a senior UX leader at Google.
I lead UX teams with a focus on constant learning and growth, delivering value for users and the business, and a healthy sense of humor ; )
Professional Experience
With over 20 years in the user experience field, I continue to be energized by the power of design to transform businesses and people’s lives. In my current role at Google I lead a UX team focused on delivering excellent Help experiences for 300+ Google products.
Day to day I guide creative direction and strategy for a multi-disciplinary user experience team. I am passionate about leading and growing inspired, engaged UX teams. I cultivate individuals’ by understanding their motivations, strengths and opportunities and providing them a pathway in their career journey with guidance along the way.
I am not easily deterred by a difficult challenge. I believe in building strong partnerships with cross-functional teams to drive alignment on UX and product strategy. I set bold product visions and guide teams to execute on them leading to business and customer value.
How I lead
Build healthy culture
Creating a healthy team culture is about building trust in me as a leader, fostering inclusion and connection amongst the team, enabling individual growth, nurturing creativity, setting a vision, clarifying the teams purpose and finding time for levity.
Enable individual growth
I invest in growing the individuals on my team and enable them to advance in their careers. I strive to lead by example, I personally put tremendous value on feedback and growth. At every step in my career I can point back to significant personal growth that helped me reach a new milestone.
Foster inclusion
For me, it’s important to foster inclusion both within the team and through the products we deliver to customers. Ensuring that everyone feels psychological safety is good for individuals and good for the business. Diverse teams are more creative and innovative and in a healthy culture, happier and more secure.
Clarify purpose
A core component in my role as a leader is to ensure everyone understands our purpose, in other words - our vision for delivering value for our users and the business. This vision is built upon insights derived from deeply understanding the users and the business. In addition to setting an inspiring vision, it’s equally important that each person understand how they contribute to the vision.
Develop insights & deliver outcomes
The most impactful contribution a UX team can make is to deeply understand users and the business to uncover where the needs of both intersect to transform the experience and improve business and user outcomes. My role is to guide the UX team to discover transformative insights, define a common strategy and craft the product solution to realize business and user value.
Have a sense of humor
Being a leader can be stressful and challenging at times. Finding the humor and joy day to day is critical to sustaining and creating an environment that people want to be a part of. I strive not to take myself too seriously.
Recent blog posts
The ability to receive feedback and act on it effectively is critical to advancing in your career. I created this mini-workshop to provide guidance on receiving, interpreting and acting on feedback.