Designer of Change: Catherine Courage

Catherine has pursued one challenge after another in developing her career. In each case, she’s led significant and systemic change where success was a not likely outcome. Her strategic persistence and design-centered approach made all the difference.

You’ve led design-driven change at a number of notable companies, starting with Oracle, then SalesForce, Citrix, and now Google. Can you talk about one of those opportunities and what about it appealed to you?

Each company I went to I was able to do something new that I hadn’t done before. For example, Citrix was a big, existing company that had been around for about 20 years. They hadn’t invested in experience design and didn’t really understand what it meant. But the CEO at the time, Mark Templeton, recruited me for that challenge and said “I’ve got your back.” I felt Mark was a leader who would stretch me, who I could learn a lot from, and I hadn’t had that kind of inspirational leader in my career. It was still a leap of faith though because I’m thinking, does he really know what this means? Is this lip service? Is he really going to back me? But I also thought, why not? If it’s a bust after a year, then I’ll go do something else.

So I took the gig, and my first impression of the job was “holy crap” this is so much. I knew how to build a UX team from my five years at Salesforce, but I didn’t realize that was only half the battle. The bigger part was changing the culture. I hadn’t done that before because at Salesforce, we were all defining the culture together. At Citrix, it’s just me and I’ve got to turn this culture upside down. I didn’t realize how much of my job was going to be about marketing, about traveling the globe, helping people understand why I existed, why UX mattered, and why they should care about it. I felt insanely overwhelmed. Like — what have I done?

You’re right–that’s a lot! How did you end up handling it?

I realized what I need to do is just focus on a couple things where I think I can make some progress while I’m building a team. I need some projects where I can get some forward momentum and use those as case studies. And I need to accept that the majority of stuff that needs to change, I’m not even going to touch. I have one swimlane where I’m building awareness about UX and why it’s important. I have another swimlane where my team focuses on a couple projects where we can get some wins. I chose low-hanging fruit like a unified design system. Right? Our products did not look like they came from the same company so let’s at least pick a color palette. I chose another project where we could design it from the ground up.

There were some other teams that really needed my help, but they were not ready to work with design. I wasn’t going to waste a full year of my life and time working with teams who were not ready. I needed to make really conscious decisions about how I was going to spend my time and realize that it was a serious journey that I was going to need to scale.

Did you get support across the whole company or were there pockets of people supporting you and pockets opposing you?

There were pockets, but generally having Mark’s support was huge because he defined the culture of that company, and he made it very clear that he cared about this initiative. And if he cared about the initiative, then other people cared about the initiative as well.

But when projects were happening, I had to use a little bit of my spidey sense to figure out where I could slot in and start to work or what I should avoid. For example, we had a lot of legacy platforms. I knew that wasn’t a good way to spend my time. I knew engineering needed to make some real significant changes about shifting the platform before I could do anything and that’s not how I wanted to spend my time at Citrix. Instead, I focused on picking something new because there was no legacy. It was fresh.

I didn’t report to Mark at the time–I reported to the person who ran all of product. He gave me the best advice when he said “I know you’re going around to all the PMs and folks and you’re going to meet with them and build relationships and let them know what you’re up to and why you’re here and I’ll do the same for you. But you also need to invest time in meeting my peers–the CFO, the person who runs HR, the person who runs sales and services, the chief legal counsel and more.” My first reaction was why do I need to do that? But he explained at the end of the day he was going to have to go in and fight for this initiative to be a continued resource area. And his peers needed to understand why we were investing in it and why it’s important and why it is like business critical to the company.

Honestly, that was some of the best advice I ever got in my career. Without it, I would not have met with them and given them that context. But since I did, It gave me greater visibility. They knew who I was, and they knew some of the things I was working on. So when anything came up at a leadership meeting level, people would be nodding their head going “Oh, yeah, I’m familiar with those projects.” So it just created this “across the whole company awareness” and it was not just me who needed to advocate. That was huge.

You’re now at Google. What’s inspiring you now?

When the Google opportunity came along, I was highly skeptical of it initially. But there was just something about it that rang true. I love stuff that’s tied to the business. I really liked the PM, and the other leaders I met, and so I thought I’m just going to give this a shot. I think it’s a good time to be here. Google is evolving so we’re going through a cultural shift to be more of a design company.

I’ll tell you one of the most unexpected things that I love about it is that I don’t run the entire UX show at Google. I have these amazing peers, and in particular to have a design leadership peer network is a major benefit, because usually you’re running design and you’re kind of lonely at the top.

Note: At the time of this interview, Catherine led user experience for Google’s ads products. Today she leads Google’s Knowledge UX team, a multi-disciplinary product experience team across Google that works on the company’s largest properties — Search, Assistant, Geo, Payments, Shopping, Travel, and Lens.

Thanks Catherine!

Find more interviews and insights like these in our latest book, Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World. Available now on Amazon or Rosenfeld Media.