Sales Intelligence & Customer Engagement at Google Ads

Outcome headline

Sellers went from 20+ planning tools to one. Three Ads organizations adopted one planning vision.

Google Ads · Sales Intelligence & Customer Engagement · 2022–2025 · Seller planning

Summary box

My role

Staff UX Manager, Sales Intelligence → Sr. Staff UX Manager, Sales Intelligence & Marketing Platform. By 2025: Design Leader, Ads – Customer Engagement – Sales Platform

Team

My team in Sales & Marketing Platform Draft note: to write: team size and composition, 2022–2025

Timeframe

2022–2025 · The planner: proposed in 2023, live by 2025

Partners

Ads Platform and YouTube Ads (the planner). The canonical planning vision was adopted across 3 Ads organizations, including YouTube Ads and Buying & Measurement.

Scope

Planning for Google's sellers (headroom planning and the planner that came out of it), and a design system for insights that look and behave the same across surfaces, including AI surfaces

The problem

In the Ads platform, one size does not fit all, and that includes the tools Google's sellers use to plan with customers.

In 2023 a team proposed taking a planning capability that already existed in Google Ads and launching it for sellers to increase usage. But marketers and sellers are fundamentally different: different personas, different hierarchies (manager account → account → campaign, versus parent company → child company → division) and different quality expectations. The job was to acknowledge the nuance and hold the bar.

I sponsored a deep UXR exploration into how sales plans are made, and how they're pitched, today. It uncovered a broad and deep pain point:

• Multiple data sources, with unmonitored access.
• Multiple tools. More than 20 tools created across PM and Eng, each solving a partial use case, hard to aggregate and hard to translate dollars into customer value for CXO pitches.
• Inconsistent methodologies and artifacts, with minimal alignment between tools and different mental models and representations.

The result was high seller pain (40+ hours to build a customer-focused, holistic, forward-looking headroom pitch) and a lack of trust from customers, sales and sales leadership, because the tools gave conflicting views of the same opportunity.

The problem reached advertisers too: optimization score recommendations (weekly) and Performance Planner (next week) gave different answers, from different forecasting engines using different methodologies.

My leadership

In 2022 I moved to the Sales & Marketing Platform, for Ads-level influence and impact: meaningful insights that drive value to customers, and to Google through Sales. By 2025 I was Design Leader, Ads – Customer Engagement – Sales Platform.

Leadership

The same 2022–2025 work, seen through the four pillars I lead by: execution, operations, strategy and culture.

Execution

Principle: Invest in the systems that make excellent work repeatable, tie every design to customer journeys and measurement, and earn partners' trust through follow-through.

In practice:

• A design system for insights. Replaced inconsistent design and form factors with one system, so insights look and behave the same across surfaces, including AI surfaces.
• The planner, shipped. I led the team to look beyond the tool, to how it fits mandated sales workflows, and delivered it as a portable capability rather than another standalone surface (Decision 3). It is live, built in partnership with Ads Platform and YouTube Ads, and took sellers from 20+ tools to 1 (Impact).
• Holding the bar. When a 2023 proposal would have relaunched an existing Google Ads planning capability for sellers, the job was to acknowledge how differently marketers and sellers work, and hold the quality bar (The problem).

Draft note: to write: how the planner was designed for measurement, and what it showed about the design's effectiveness

Operations

Principle: Put scarce design capacity on the highest-impact work, agreed and documented each year and quarter, and make every trade-off explicit.

In practice:

• A predictable operating model. Replaced reactive operations and churn with a clear design and launch process that increased clarity.
• Clear ownership across Ads. The planner clarified roles and responsibilities across Ads, crisped the go-to-market, and exposed and aligned overlaps (Impact).

Draft note: to write: one example of annual or quarterly prioritization, or a documented trade-off between an emerging opportunity and the agreed strategy

Strategy

Principle: Earn the right to set direction through business and product acumen, make ideas concrete in design, align them with customer and business goals, and time them to what the organization is ready for.

In practice:

• An evergreen manifest. Replaced single-year, rigid strategies for 13 products with a durable, evergreen manifest that allows a range of action.
• From siloed to customer-centric. Moved from bespoke, siloed products to centralized experiences with concentrated impact, and from a feature-focused, Google-centric strategy to a customer-centric one.
• Evidence first. Sponsored a deep UXR study of how sales plans are made and pitched. It surfaced 20+ tools each solving a partial use case, 40+ hours to build a headroom pitch, and a lack of trust because the tools gave conflicting views of the same opportunity (The problem).
• One vision across three organizations. Rather than launch one more tool, I influenced across 3 Ads organizations to solve planning at its core; YouTube Ads and Buying & Measurement adopted the canonical vision (Decision 1).
• A staged roadmap. Headroom planning sequenced from single-product (short term) to multi-product with interaction effects (mid term) to cross-funnel, aligned with customer objectives (long term) (Decision 2).

Culture

Principle: Sustain high impact without burnout: invite challenge, lead with curiosity, favor consistency over intensity, and build systems rather than chase goals.

In practice:

• Explicit team norms. Data-informed decision making. Lead with curiosity and debate respectfully. Consistency over intensity. Systems over goals. The team's happiness and effectiveness improved.

Happy teams (high impact, low burnout) mean low attrition, knowledge that stays longer, and better, faster work.

Key decisions

Decision 1: Solve planning at its core, across three organizations.

Rather than launch one more tool for sellers, I influenced across 3 Ads organizations to solve the problem at its core, and created a canonical vision that YouTube Ads and Buying & Measurement adopted.

Decision 2: Set a customer-centric vision for headroom planning.

Short term, primitive, single-product headroom planning. Mid term, multi-product planning that accounts for interaction effects. Long term, cross-funnel headroom planning aligned with customer objectives.

Decision 3: A portable capability, not another standalone surface.

I inspired the team to look beyond the tool: how it integrates with mandated sales workflows, and how it can change the way Google sells with a more holistic, ambitious approach to planning. The result, the planner, gives sellers a single point of view to identify strategic headroom aligned with customer goals, alongside an execution plan to fulfill them (the image at the top of this page).

Impact

• The planner is live, built in partnership with Ads Platform and YouTube Ads. It took sellers from 20+ tools to 1, clarified roles and responsibilities across Ads, crisped the go-to-market, and exposed and aligned overlaps. Impact as reported: +$XB in incremental ARR and -XXXM in headcount savings (figures redacted).

What I'd do differently

Draft note: to write

Where I saw it going (2025)

AI-first as a transformational lens, leapfrogging traditional marketing. Today, many recommendation engines send mixed signals to sellers and customers about how to spend across the funnel. The holy grail is the true full funnel: one budget plus the customer's goals, allocated intelligently to maximize ROI. Getting there takes reasoning (customer trust built on a core AI capability), agentic marketing across planning, creative generation, targeting, bidding, reporting, optimization and troubleshooting, AI as a trusted business advisor with the customer truly at the center, and new UX paradigms: prompts and conversation as UI, shape-shifting and multimodal, interconnected.

Next

→ Leading Google Ads platform design (2017–2022)