In this episode, Travis Neilson interviews Jens Riegelsberger, a UX Director at Google, about the company’s evolving design identity. Riegelsberger discusses his role in launching Google’s Product Excellence program—an initiative that sets the bar for quality and usability across all Google products—and what it means to build teams that favor multiple perspectives and diverse skillsets.

A few highlights:

On being a good leader
“Look at your job as chiefly to enable other people's insights and eureka moments. That doesn't mean abdicating responsibility. It takes actually quite a bit of work to do this well.”

On embracing healthy friction
“Frankly, we can't have a static, preordained culture because we work in a field where so much change is happening all the time. So knowing that we all have to negotiate culture and that it's a fluid thing prepares us well for the changes that are coming.”

On the value of “dabbling”
“I have a PhD in computer science, but I also taught at art school. So there's this mix of different identities that I’ve had to cobble together. I’ve never deeply believed, ‘Okay, this worldview is the only true worldview; my science or my community knows how it's done,’ because I've always jumped around.”