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I lead the product design team at Uber. We're a team of 180 passionate designers, researchers, writers, design engineers, motion designers, and producers working together to create the next generation of worldwide transportation. We're excited to fast forward to a future where traffic is considerably reduced, cities are greener and safer, personal car ownership is a thing of the past. For more information on our team and our impact, view this talk.
When I started at Uber in 2015, my main focus was to lead its Growth Design Team. We were a lean, mean, experimental design team. Never afraid to move fast, deploy new ideas, focus on the business, and get results. All while maintaining a high level of magic. Paul Smith, one of the design managers on the team, sums up the Growth Design Team's practices nicely in this post.
After a few months and a few miles with the Growth team, Uber reorganized and the entire Growth org merged with another large product org. With the merging of orgs, I became responsible for the entire Product Design Team. This team includes Uber's core Rider, Driver, and Marketplace teams which are supported by Mapping, Safety, Payments, and Business Platform Tooling teams. Also under my purview is the Global team, who focus on projects unique to Latin America, South East Asia, India, Africa, Europe and Russia, as well as our Business team, who create products that allow small, medium, and enterprise level business to incorporate Uber into their workflows.
Like the rest of Uber, between the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2017, the Product Design team went through massive growth both in terms of staff headcount and operational development. In response to this growth, my leadership team and I executed on a wide range of initiatives to ensure the Product Design team scaled successfully. This initiatives include the creation of internal learning and development courses, a redesign of our job ladders and performance review process, the maturation of our design process to include design sprints, the development of a Platform Design team to create common reusable tools to help designers work better and faster, the institution of a content strategy team, hosting Uber Design Nights to share back with the community, launching Uber.design to showcase the great work that isn't always obvious, all while shipping high quality design.
If you are interested in learning more about Design at Uber, don't hesitate to contact me.