Google’s VP of UX Catherine Courage: Designing your own Future
The TrailBlaze-Hers podcast tells the stories of influential women in tech — one story at a time. Hosted by members of the WITS team, today our first conversation is with Catherine Courage — VP of User Experience at Google, leading design teams across Google’s Commerce and Ads product areas. A Newfoundland native, Catherine has held prominent user experience leadership roles at Citrix, Salesforce, and Oracle.
How come a Fortune 500 Board Director and Vice President of Google agreed to be our very first guest? Catherine, like others, is ready for diversity in tech to move forward.
Here, she shares her insights with you to help make that happen. In this episode, we dig into Catherine’s background in psychology, UX at Google, and what she’s learned through leading a 600-person organization at Google. If you’re curious about design or want to learn from the experiences of a Google VP, this episode fits the bill.
A great place to start would be to learn more about your background. Having studied psychology, how has a degree unconventional to the design field help you lead a UX team focusing on commerce and ads?
Yeah, it’s a great question. I would say when I did my undergraduate degree, when I first thought about what I wanted to do in university or college, I really wasn’t certain. That gave me a lot of pressure and angst. My mother gave me the very wise advice, “Just do something you love. Don’t do what you think you need to do. Study in the areas you really enjoy.” That turned out to be the area of psychology for me. What I loved was the study of human behaviour and I really went deep on the experimental side.
Then, when I was coming close to graduating, I was really glad I had done that because I had enjoyed all that I’d learned but I had this new sense of angst of “Ok, now what? What am I going to do with this degree?” I knew I had wanted to go off and do a master’s degree; I didn’t think I wanted to do clinical psychology and that’s the typical thing that people think of when they think of a career that’s psychology based. I literally went to the career office and started opening books and reading about different career paths. I came across the field of Human Factors and I thought, “This is really interesting” because it’s a combination of two of the things I love: my study, my
background of human behaviour, and then how you use your understanding of human behaviour to design products. I thought, “How have I never heard of this field before?”
Truly, it was going to the career office that sent me down this path. Then, I applied to a number of schools, decided to go off to the University of Toronto, where I studied, as part of their industrial engineering program, a focus on human factors. I was very fortunate that when I graduated, it was the first tech boom and even though I had a job lined up in Toronto and planned to stay there, my focus had been on driving behaviour. There was something that lured me out to the call of San Francisco. I had done a few classes in Human Computer Interaction. I enjoyed them but I never thought I would work in tech. Tech actually intimidated me a little bit, but I just thought, you know what, if I don’t like it, Toronto is always there. I can come back. Why not give it a shot? What do I have to lose? And so, the rest is history.
Now you fast forward, here we are in 2019 and there are so many specialized programs that are very targeted towards HCI and psychology paths that lead you towards the study of design of products. And so, the landscape has changed dramatically.
When we think about ads, we usually think about the construction of an ad and how that box on the side of the screen is communicating a value proposition to you and not so much about the human interaction or the user experience surrounding the ads. What does user experience of ads look like to you and how does that communicate value users and businesses?
It’s an interesting challenge that we work on here at Google, especially as user experience professionals. This is what I love about working in the enterprise in the business space. You’ve got to create something that’s going to create value for your customers, your business users, but you also need to create value for your end users. And sometimes those things can be at tension, so how do you find the right balance of those things?
I think Google’s secret sauce over the years, especially with the ad space, has been trying to add value. If you search for something like a four-man tent, you may get a response back that shows an ad for REI. Now REI is a very reasonable place that I may want to buy a four-person tent. The ad is actually providing utility and value.
And so, it is getting away from the old format of ads, which were very much banners and blinking and things that were not relevant to giving you something that’s contextually relevant. That’s what we continue to do across the ad ecosystem. It’s even more important today that people understand why ads are being served to them, that they have options to determine what is served to them and what is not served to them. That’s a big change that we’ve seen in the landscape over the last couple of years. I think it’s great that Google is really dedicated to transparency and making sure that users understand what’s going on as well.
What drives you to advocate for the user experience of commerce and advertisements at Google?
I just love being tied to things that are tied to the business. I have always worked in the enterprise space.
I keep saying that I’m going to go over to consumer core consumer and somehow enterprise keeps drawing me back. I think it’s because of that unique, complex challenge of trying to satisfy both. I think that ads can provide a real utility and can provide real value to end users. That’s the line that we need to continue to draw. And I think user experience is just critical in that and in understanding how people perceive ads. We do these great, detailed studies of what makes an ad annoying, these very subtle things. We don’t want to just put things up there and to have them in people’s viewpoint. We want to have things that truly provide value. So being able to push on that with our PM (product management) and eng (engineering) counterparts and make sure that we all together value both the user and the business user is just to me a really interesting proposition.
Having such a substantial role in design at Google and also having done a lot of UX leadership or management research yourself, something that fascinates us is that you’re managing essentially young designers who look at their work on a day to day basis and UX managers who could be working on these long term projects, all while also managing the expectations of the directors that you work across multiple product areas. This graph soon starts getting really, really complex, at
least when we try to map it out. For you, how do you make sure that all the different teams that you’re working with are marching at the same pace?
“It’s hard”, is the short answer.
But I consider that a core part of my role. I’m really glad you asked this question. One of the biggest failings, I think young leaders learn as they’re growing through the ranks is they want to try and do everything. That might work when you’re a manager of five people and through osmosis, you understand all the communications and everything that’s happening. As you scale to lead teams of 20 people, 100 people, 200 people, our organization is at about six hundred people, you just cannot know everything. It’s not your job to know everything. Your focus very much changes. You need to have a very strong leadership bench that you trust implicitly both ways. I trust that they will raise their hand to let me know if there’s something going on that I need to jump into. They trust me in terms of they know I have their back and I know I will give visibility to the most important projects that are going on. We work really closely together to understand what the most important initiatives are and ensure that we are working on those. I stay very close to the smallest set of those. Those would be the ones that I’m tracking on a very, very regular basis.
The other ones are, again, things that will be raised to me. It means on an average day, there are lots of things that I have no idea that are happening. You have to get comfortable with that because it’s not your job to know everything that’s going on at every level. You just can’t scale that way. You always need to go back and do a check- in again, “OK, these are the things that I think are the most important. Are they still the most important?”, because another dangerous thing that people can do is assume that the five things they focused on this year and the first half of the year are the same most important things for the second half of the year. You can pick whatever time duration, but in fact, priorities have shifted, whether it’s the business or the user needs. And you have to be able to keep up with that. It’s constantly doing a recheck to ensure that you’re focused on those key things and then just trusting that your team is going to alert you if there are fire drills that you need to be aware of.
There’s no doubt that leading a global loop of hundreds of people across various revenue driven products is a huge responsibility. As you manage the UX process
of all these different areas, how do you overcome those instances of creative blocks and more instances of burnout?
Yeah, it goes back to what we were talking about a little bit earlier, focus.
Sometimes you go back into the mode of, “Oh, wait, I don’t know what’s going on in that project and I need to go that meeting.” I have a small joke that when you’re early in your career, people have FOMO, the fear of missing out. When you’re later in your career, it’s more a fear of being included.
You can’t you just can’t do everything, so as you get a lot of asks, it means you need to empower other people to do that on your behalf. If it’s important work and I can’t do it then my job is to find someone who can be engaged and oversee it. That’s really the important juggling task that you have on a regular basis.
In one of your Medium articles where you say, “Seniority doesn’t correlate with competence. You never know the path that other people walk.” A reoccurring theme that always comes up in our WITS community discussions is the topic of imposter syndrome. Having achieved the success that you had to date, it would be really interesting to share with our community how you’ve come to this place where we’ve been able to recognize instances of imposter syndrome and then overcome them.
One of my favorite quotes is, “Growth and comfort don’t co-exist”.
If you’re someone who has a growth mindset and you want to continually learn and have breadth and greater depth, learn new skills, and oversee different areas, you have to fully expect that you’re constantly going to have imposter syndrome. Every time I make a significant change, take on something new, or get handed a special project, very often you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I really know very little about this area”. But you have to have confidence in your abilities.
How many times have you taken on these new things and had that same feeling? But you always figure it out. It’s noticing the repeat pattern of, “This happens all the time. I always have the feeling of panic”. But then you settle in, you get to know the players,
and understand what needs to be done. Then, you forget that you even had that feeling of insecurity at all.
It’s truly just getting to a place where you anticipate and know that as you take on these big new challenges, whether it’s a new job or a big project, you will have that moment in time where you do feel like, “Why was this hand to me? I know nothing about this. Why didn’t they give it to someone else? I’m not qualified.”
Someone gave it to you for a reason, because they believed in you. You have to know immediately out of the gate that whoever handed you that project or that job, they have your back. They believe you can do this. If you’re having those doubts, I mean, you work with this person. You have ways to reinforce and check that you’re going down the right path.
Having reached out to and learn from a lot of inspiring female tech leaders such as yourself, it seems as though it’s common that as much as we plan and expect our career path to follow as one singular line, it often becomes a series of twists and turns. What advice can you share to young designers so that they are better equipped to face that journey and any twists and turns that come along with it?
I believe that it’s always important to think about where you want to go and what you might want to achieve but have flexibility in that vision.
I think sometimes people can get so focused on the linear that they miss these growth opportunities that are on the sides. Always be open minded in terms of different opportunities that might come your way.
A great way that I always got exposure to those as I was going through my career was at many of the cross-functional committees or groups that came up when I was at different companies. I’d usually be the first one to raise my hand and say, “That sounds interesting. I’d like to get involved in it.” It may have been the projects that initially spurred me. But then, as I started to do this throughout my career, I realized, “Yes, I get to work on an interesting project outside my day to day.” But secondly, you then build these relationships across the company. You get to meet people in different roles or different departments that you wouldn’t necessarily work in. It gets you exposure to
different things that maybe you’re interested in that you might not have considered. So that’s always been incredibly valuable both for me and I think it’s really allowed me to open my eyes to other possibilities.
The other thing that I would say is that I often meet young UX professionals who come out and are very focused on their craft, whether it’s the craft of user research or visual design or interaction design. Absolutely, that is critical. You need to really hone your craft.
But then, there are so many other skills you need in order to be successful. Collaboration, no great design comes to life on its own. You need someone to build it. You need some to build a business case behind it. You need to be able to work with a set of peers. You need to build influence because the project manager or product manager may be concerned about budget and you may be concerned about this perfect design and why. And so, being able to collaborate and influence are really, really important things.
The last thing I would say is storytelling is so, so important. You can’t just hand over mocks and expect someone to implement your vision.
What is the story behind this and why does it matter? What’s the benefit it’s going to bring to the user? What’s the benefit that it’s going to bring to the business? Don’t assume that people just naturally get that. It may all be inside your head, but you need to find a way to tell a really compelling story. Often when I see UX people do that, that’s when product managers, engineers, or executives light up and go, “We need to do that”. It’s not just about the craft. It’s about many of these other skills that will help you bring your craft to life.
SheHacks and Women in Technology Society really pride in being a community of women who champion each other and support each other. Is there a certain mentor that you’d like to shout out who has been pivotal to your career or even just who you have become today?
Yeah, I absolutely think two come to mind, two categories.
One is family. My mother worked was a working mother. She went to school. I have two older brothers. There were three kids. I didn’t realize it at all. Now, I look at her as being Wonder Woman. I didn’t see it at the time. She just managed to do it all. I thought, well, that’s what everybody does. She’s been a real role model. She also had three sisters who were all professionals as well. There was this role model of these very strong women with strong careers. I grew up in that environment and I felt there was nothing I couldn’t do. I was treated very much as an equal to my two brothers. I think that set a very strong foundation to me from a very early age.
Once I got into the working fields, someone who was super important to me was actually a sponsor. It was a gentleman, Al Monserrat, who I worked with at Citrix. He just saw potential in me and opened many doors for me. That’s what a sponsor does as compared to a mentor. He would invite me into meetings, he would engage me in projects. Someone opening the door is really, really important. He just trusted me and saw that, you know, this person seems bright and engaged and I’m going to give her a chance. It was thanks to him that ultimately the design role at Citrix ended up reporting to the CEO, which was just a huge opportunity that I never, ever envisioned. The combination of mentorship and sponsorship is a really powerful combination.
It was great at Citrix to have a male who was actually my sponsor, which was really nice. I think sometimes we’re always looking for a female role model, but it shouldn’t be gender that’s necessarily the defining trait. It should be, “Who do I see as a really good role model? Who’s someone who I really want to learn from their behaviors?” Regardless of gender, I think that’s what you want to look for in a in a mentor or sponsor.
