Veen: So what’s unique about Google? You’ve seen a few of these big Internet companies now from the inside.
Au: There are so many things that are so fascinating about Google. The way this company is designed, the whole organization is completely inverted. There’s incredible empowerment in all levels of the company. A lot of start-ups, they start out flat, but then as they grow as companies, they become more hierarchical and more silo-ed. Google has done an amazing job of avoiding that. So the company still operates in a very flat way. People are very much empowered, and there’s a lot of freedom and flexibility to explore and pursue your passions. If you really believe in something, you can absolutely go make things happen. That [makes it] very easy to build things.
JV: Have you seen challenges in being a designer at Google, a very sort of technology-focused and -centered company?
IA: It is challenging. I think in a lot of conventional companies, design is kind of a top-down process. Where you think about who are your target users, what’s the market you’re going after, what are their needs. You do requirements-gathering, and then you design the experience around that, and then you tell the engineers to go build. Here, the way products are conceived a lot of times, it’s an engineer has some kind of idea and then starts building it and then — as it gains momentum — a product manager and a designer might become attached to it.
So it’s a very bottoms-up kind of process, which is very different to how designers are trained to think about product development. Yet I still think that there are ways that designers can work within that environment and still have products be use-driven and design-driven, but the ways in which you go about getting yourself inserted might be quite different than [at] other cultures, [which] are maybe more top-down, or product- or marketing- or design-driven.
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