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Meydad Marzan

About

I'm Meydad. I lead the Advertiser Design Team for AI Monetization at Microsoft AI, in Mountain View. I've spent about 19 years designing products and building the teams that make them: first as a founding designer, then as a head of design, then leading design teams on Google Ads.

At Microsoft AI, my team spent the past year rebuilding the Microsoft Ads foundation (431 pages of UI, two front-end stacks, four generations of design system) and launched the Microsoft Ads redesign in July 2026. We also built AI-native building tools, a kit, a studio and a hub, that let designers and PMs turn ideas into grounded prototypes.

Lately most of my energy goes into how design itself works with AI. The model is rarely the bottleneck. The context we give it, the tools we build around it, and the teams who use them matter far more. I write about that on X and on my Substack. Older essays live on Medium.

I trained as an industrial designer at Bezalel, with an exchange at UdK Berlin, and I still think in materials and constraints. I work in English and Hebrew.

Draft note: to write: one personal line, e.g. what you do outside work

How I work

Four lenses, one for each job a design org has to do. I wrote them down for my team at Google in 2025 and still run on them.

Strategy: earn the right to set direction.

  • Build business and product acumen first. It takes time, and it is what makes partners trust you to lead.
  • Make ideas concrete. Form them as design mocks, socialize them, and align them with customer and business goals.
  • Failed alignment is learning, not failure. Large systems change slowly, so read the rhythm of the org and time new ideas to it.

Execution: practice excellence.

  • Craft is the foundation. Invest in the tools and systems that let you solve problems thoroughly, and faster each time.
  • Tie every piece of work to a customer journey, and design with measurement in mind so you learn how well it worked.
  • Trust is earned four ways: expertise, empathy for partners' constraints, follow-through, and transparency early and often. (A frame borrowed from Reputation Rules.)

Operations: be effective and efficient.

  • Resources are always fewer than the ideas. Put time on the highest-impact work, agreed and written down each year and quarter.
  • Estimate diligently, and say plainly what can and cannot be done.
  • When something urgent emerges, weigh its effort and impact against the deliberate plan, trade off, and document what was cut.

Culture: stay happy and healthy as a team.

  • Challenge me. Healthy debate makes ideas better, and "no" is a valid answer when it comes with a rationale.
  • Lead with curiosity, not judgment. Learn what went into a decision before you challenge it.
  • Consistency over intensity. Happy teams keep their knowledge longer and do better, faster work. Intensity should be rare, and followed by recovery.
  • We don't rise to the level of our goals; we fall to the level of our systems (after James Clear). So build the systems.

Timeline

Aug 2025 – now
Design Director, Microsoft AI. Advertiser Design Team, AI Monetization · Mountain View
Oct 2023 – Aug 2025
Google. Sr. Staff UX Manager, Sales Intelligence & Marketing Platform
May 2022 – Sep 2023
Google. Staff UX Manager, Sales Intelligence
Jan 2020 – May 2022
Google. Staff UX Manager, Google Ads. Led the Google Ads Platform Services UX Design team (US, India)
Feb 2019 – Jan 2020
Google. UX Manager, Google Ads, App Ads
May 2017 – Jan 2019
Google. Interaction Designer, Google Ads
Aug 2015 – May 2017
Head of Design, Jobcase
Mar 2013 – Aug 2015
Roomer Travel. Head of Design
Feb 2012 – Mar 2013
Roomer Travel. UX/UI Designer
Education
Bachelor, Industrial and Product Design, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design (2007–2011) · UdK Berlin exchange, Lighting Design (2009–2010)

Contact

The best way to reach me is email: meydadmar@gmail.com.