# Micah Laaker > 1st designer in Google’s Office of the CEO | Built & led 80+ person UX teams | Now designing for climate tech & agentic AI Location: Mountain View, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/micahlaaker 11 years at Google (8 as Director of UX). 1st designer in the Office of the CEO. Led teams of 80+ across 4 global sites serving 8 billion+ users. Only non-engineer selected to lead 2 of 17 Google-wide technical governance programs. Now? Electrification/renewable energy and AI. I'm currently the Founding Product Designer at Across AI, where I'm redefining how Sales teams collaborate with agentic AI. I advise climate startups (combining product experience + passion for making renewable energy/electrification accessible) through my consultancy Sedapa, and serve a number of nonprofits supporting others. The common thread across 25 years of product design: I make complex systems feel simple and build solutions that scale. Whether that's Google's identity infrastructure, a comic book marketplace (yes, I did that too at Graphicly), or the clean energy transition. I'm always interested in conversations about design leadership, climate tech, AI tooling, or the intersection of all three. ## Work Experience ### Founding Product Designer @ Across AI Jan 2024 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States First product management & design hire. Own the Village Global- & Cota Capital-backed agentic AI startup’s product strategy, fusing patent-pending ‘institutional memory,’ always-on agents, and integration into enterprise tech sales teams’ existing toolsets to speed sales cycles and scale management support. ### Founder, Non-profit & Climate CX consultant @ Sedapa Jan 2024 – Present | Mountain View, California, United States Product design consultation for climate technology & non-profit organizations, such as: • Trainsit — Design & storytelling • Net Zero Angels — Design, storytelling, & development • Molly Wood Media — SFCW film & panel event • Climate Bookshop — Serverless climate book club list • Climate Vine — Design & development • Cloud Sustainability Watch — Design & brand ### Product Design Lead @ Climate Vine Jan 2024 – Jan 2025 | Mountain View, California, United States * The go-to person for Product Design and User Research knowledge, user-centered product development, and networking. * Connect members with expert design, research, and product management talent * Help other members lead working groups, learning circles, build sprint groups and member-led events * Share relevant, curated resources and updates about product design in climate & sustainability technology ### Member (Cohort 4) @ Climate Vine Jan 2024 – Jan 2025 | Mountain View, California, United States Curated peer-to-peer network of diverse members, ranging from climate entrepreneurs to policy makers, investors, researchers, academics, activists, scientists, and designers. Collaborate with other Members to accelerate our collective action. Learn more or apply for the next cohort at climatevine.co/apply ### Domain Lead for User Experience: AI Experience Infrastructure @ Google Jan 2021 – Jan 2024 | Mountain View, California, United States One of only 17 recruited executives to govern technical cross-company alignment, and only Domain Lead running two Domain programs. Strategic opinionated decision maker for Google’s cross-company cross-functional UX product development toolchain (including both internal & external tools and ecosystem-boosting common components for core user actions) and the processes to drive their usage. Moving Google from myriad disconnected tools requiring multiple handoffs to one where design decisions, as well as product definition, are collaboratively developed in code (and high-performing existing solutions are easily and repeatedly adopted to unify product experiences). Marshal key executives and subject matter experts across organizations to repeatedly and successfully develop informed recommendations, data-driven investments, and adoption of these strategies. Identified gap in cross-company leadership for Visual Design role, supported development of charter for inclusive virtual leadership committee, championed with Google-wide UX Leadership Council, and serve as 1st exec sponsor. Additionally served as senior executive for central AI Experience Infrastructure organization (focused on partnerships & platform solutions to align users’ artificial intelligence-augmented experiences across Google). ### Director, UX: Office of the CEO @ Google Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | Mountain View, CA Partner with cross-functional executive team to unify Google’s myriad experiences as an intentional system of products to improve user understanding, expectations, and agility, as well as organizational opportunity for both regulatory response and better cross-app user journeys. Key areas of focus: user privacy, kids & families, and cross-product cohesion. ### Director, UX: User Team @ Google Jan 2016 – Jan 2019 | Sunnyvale, California, United States Executive leadership of Google’s User Team platform. Organized and led multidisciplinary UX teams repeatedly through complex organizational landscape, planning and executing a leadership diversification to ensure UX delivered not only high-quality product for the multiple billions of active users across Google’s product landscape but also laying a path towards solving some of the company’s greatest threats: user trust, privacy, security, and safety. Grew Google’s largest, most-enduring usable security & privacy UX team to more than 80 across 4 global sites. Sponsored, guided, and delivered company’s largest user-facing Identity overhaul in partnership with all flagship apps on Android and iOS, announced by CEO at Google I/O 2019. ### UX Manager III @ Google Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 | Mountain View, California, United States Drive UX vision and team for Identity: Google's “front door” & unifying thread across products and platforms. Identity enables consistent personalization across all Google apps and platforms; develops industry-leading security and privacy-sensitive controls; deploys common UI infrastructure to align brand, user identity, network/personalized alerts & account management; and provides transparency & controls into personal data. Built a strong 49-person cross-functional product design team across Mountain View, Munich, Tel Aviv and New York (consisting of research, writing, prototyping, accessibility, visual & interaction design, and program management) focused on simplifying online identity (not just in Google apps but across the Web, 3rd-party apps, and devices as well). ### UX Manager II @ Google Jan 2012 – Jan 2014 | Mountain View, CA Lead cross-discipline UX team in simplifying & securing identity, managing multiple accounts and extending personalization for Google products across all platforms (Open Web, Chrome, ChromeOS, Android & iOS). Prior: manage a growing UX team to develop a holistic user story for small business merchants to own their brand, profile, consumer engagement, and more across Google Search, Maps, Ads, Shopping, and more. ### Chief Product Officer @ Graphicly Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 | Palo Alto, CA Define & document organizational strategy, moving from comic book marketplace to distribution tools for visual storytelling publishers (children’s books, art/photography books, comics, magazines, & more). Lead product management & user experience in retooling existing product line and development of new tools (which automate production line to near-instantly output ebooks for iBooks, Kindle, Kobo & NOOK and apps for Android & iOS). ### VP of Product Experience @ Graphicly Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 | Palo Alto, CA Connecting comics, characters, creators + conversations. Managed product definition and user experience for entire product line of user-facing marketplace applications (containing 6k titles from 300+ publishers). In 10 months, launched: * Apple iOS5 Newsstand Comics (#90 top-grossing app, plus 5 others in top 200, enabling instant subscription delivery of latest issue for a specific title) * Android Market & Amazon Appstore storefront (first app to allow purchase & reading of Marvel Comics on Android) * NOOK Color/Tablet Collections (bundled packages of issues/graphic novels with Facebook integration and featured upsells; subsequently released on Android Market and Kindle Fire Appstore) * HTML5 Web App (complete browse, preview & purchase of entire catalog; Facebook OpenGraph integration; Google In-App Payments & Offline Access integration, earning keynote feature presentation at Google I/O 2011) * Facebook Page Custom Tab App (allows publishers to embed book reading and purchasing, as well as curation, within their FB Page) * Web Widgets (for easy sharing of any book around the Web) * Updates to iPad & iPhone marketplaces ### Director, Product Management and User Experience, Developer Platforms @ Yahoo! Jan 2009 – Jan 2011 Lead a passionate team of product managers, partner management, UI designers, and UX engineers focused on improving the experience of 3rd-party developers/publishers (and their users) as they engage with Yahoo!'s Social, Authentication and Application platforms. * Successfully led platform teams in cross-company effort to land Zynga social gaming apps contract * Launched Yahoo!'s 1st comprehensive public user-generated content API: Updates Search (Firehose) API * Consolidated Yahoo!'s developer interfaces into a single, primary interface: YQL (Yahoo! Query Language), which unifies access to Yahoo! and 3rd-party APIs and data ### Director, User Experience, Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) @ Yahoo! Jan 2008 – Jan 2010 Led a multi-disciplinary team of nine interaction designers, visual designers, and prototypers on developer management solutions * Consolidated several disparate design teams into a unified group * Unified Yahoo!'s application management interfaces * Managed highest level of team satisfaction within the platform organization ### Director, User Experience, Applications Platform @ Yahoo! Jan 2007 – Jan 2008 Built and led new design team to create Yahoo!'s first multi-product developer platform for injecting 3rd-party-created experiences into Yahoo.com, Yahoo! Profiles, My Yahoo!, and Yahoo! Toolbar. * Led company-wide effort to communicate Yahoo!'s technology re-wiring strategy internally and externally * Successfully delivered multiple releases incorporating end-user and developer feedback * Delivered cross-product information architecture with select cross-company team ### Senior Design Manager, Developer Network @ Yahoo! Jan 2007 – Jan 2007 * Successfully championed and built Yahoo!'s 1st developer-focused UX team * Established YDN site's information architecture * Successfully articulated and communicated several channels of Yahoo!'s Open Strategy effort, leading to creation of next role (and Yahoo!'s current developer efforts) ### Senior Design Manager: Network Personalization, Open Content (RSS) Platform, and Membership @ Yahoo! Jan 2005 – Jan 2007 * Designed Yahoo!'s first social media strategy solutions (cross-product sharing, saving, bookmarking, etc.) * Built and hired 1st UX team for cross-product personalization * Managed design efforts on 1st successful overhaul of account registration ### Design Manager, My Yahoo! @ Yahoo! Jan 2004 – Jan 2005 * Designed and prototyped product architecture for My Yahoo! redesign successfully launched in 2005 * Created adaptive MediaRSS framework for presenting content in its preferred format * Led design strategy to unify Yahoo.com and My Yahoo!'s personalization migration experience ### Creative Director @ Fearless Concepts/Island Def Jam Music Group Jan 2003 – Jan 2004 Lead multi-disciplinary creative team on projects for Island Def Jam Music Group. Establish processes for project development. Manage staff and freelancers. Develop creative & architectural specifications to direct development efforts. ### Design Consultant @ Sedapa Jan 2001 – Jan 2003 | New York, New York, United States • Directed the ACLU’s most viral content: Pizza Privacy film https://m13.me/pizzaclu • Designed and illustrated paranormal trivia game: Tall Tales • Authored “SAMS Teach Yourself SVG in 24 Hours” (Sams/Pearson) and “Photoshop CS in 10 Simple Steps or Less” (Wiley & Sons) Clients: ACLU, Samsung, Harvard University Physics Department, Wiley Publishing, LuckyPix, Partnership for a Drug-Free America, and Wireless Generation. ### Art Director / Manager, R&D @ Iguana Studios, Inc. Jan 1999 – Jan 2001 | New York, New York, United States * Wrote, co-directed, and designed 1st full-length, live-action, rotoscoped Flash music video (for Sub Verse Music's MF Doom) * Successfully championed and created internal R&D program to investigate design and technology intersections * SVG investigation landed $250K contract for 1st commercial SVG development Clients: Adobe Systems, Battlebots, Lockheed Martin, Stan Lee Media, and Zagat ### Art Director @ BlairLake New Media Jan 1997 – Jan 1999 | Kansas City, Missouri, United States • Designed and illustrated interactive media for clients • Designed one of 1st database-driven Flash games (for Disney Channel's Vault Disney) • Transferred internally to lead NYC office's design team Clients: Sprint PCS, Disney Channel, Johns Hopkins University, Avon Books, Smithsonian Magazine, and Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation ## Education ### BFA w/ Honors in Visual Communications (Graphic Design & Illustration) The University of Kansas ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/mlaaker - Website: http://m13.me/resume --- Source: https://flows.cv/micahlaaker JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/micahlaaker/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-05