Oddmachine is the name for my product design practice. With a focus on the application of user experience discipline, Oddmachine projects are always about innovation -- creating something new from nothing. Projects include a "future state" vision for a large healthcare provider, a SaaS tool for error management of cloud-based applications, a new service design for "Smart" homeowner's insurance as iOT goes mainstream. It's a fascinating time to be making things!

At Centene, my project was to create a vision for the customer experience 3-5 years in the future. I was fortunate to have an amazing team of designers, researchers & strategists to work with. After much thought and collaboration, my proposal centered on radically clarifying the meaning of all the information a person needs to even begin to understand Medicare.

I was astounded at how clumsy the semantics of Medicare are, how poorly the information is framed for users that could be facing some of the most difficult days of their lives. The opportunity for making Medicare information better is vast.

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.

In this role within Google Cloud, I'll be using my experience leading design within innovative technology teams such as Mashery/Intel (API Management), Docker(containers) and Backtrace(error forensics). I'll be working with an amazing team of researchers, product managers, and designers to uncover, define, unravel, and with some luck solve, complex problems that users encounter or may encounter in the future. From subtle usability issues to fundamental user alignment, we'll be fearlessly exploring the very edges of what is possible in Cloud computing.