San Francisco, California, United States
This position was with Google's UFO organization (Unified Fulfillment Optimization). A strange name that meant I was working to help the folks in Google's data centers run their supply chain with an internal product called Talos. I got to visit the data center in Omaha and listen to all the diagnosticians, power specialists and the people that move million dollar racks of compute power.
My team of researchers and designers was absolutely amazing. My role expanded quickly from Staff independent contributor to manager and we scrambled to A. make sure what we were doing was valuable and B. make sure we actually knew what our impact was.
Our projects came in every shape and size. We worked on the usability of the core business metric used by sales, operations, engineering to determine success. We envisioned a consolidated platform from the ragtag fleet of disparate sources.
One designer on the team worked on the user experience of robots in the data center.
We explored experimental AI diagnostics experiences and designed a power and cooling war room.
Fascinating, unusual projects to say the least, but that's what gets me out of bed in the morning.