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Ed Lea is a product designer who grew up in a village near Leamington Spa, a small town in the United Kingdom that he describes as a bit like the Shire from The Lord of the Rings. Hes lived there on and off since the age of four, recently returning with his wife and daughter after over a decade in SanJose.Ed was my manager at Google many years ago and has since quickly risen through the ranks at Google. He started as a Design Lead, and was quickly promoted to Head of UX at Google News, Director of UX on Google Search App, Director UX at Pixel Watch and Fitbit and most recently, Head of Design at YouTubeTV.Hes highly skilled in building teams with strong culture and facilitating user centered design. Some of the news team still has a group chat going 8 yearslater!You can find Ed on LinkedIn.What was your journey getting into product design?I started university in 1995, studying graphic design. In my first year, the department didnt even have computers, so my focus was mostly on photography, working in the darkroom, composing shots, and exploring visual composition.For my 21st birthday, my parents bought me my first computer: a Power Mac G3. I still have it! I remember installing Dreamweaver and discovering hyperlinks. Sitting in my bedroom, I clicked on a link that took me from one page to another and it felt like magic. That moment sparked my interest in what we then called multimedia.After graduating, I worked at Abbey Road Studios creating multimedia for the music and film industries. This included DVD menus and enhanced CDs, albums that, when loaded into a computer, opened an app with photos of the band and extra content. I loved how it combined design with technology.We had a small team at Abbey Road Studios with six designers and just one engineer. One day, that engineer introduced me to Google. At the time, I was still using Ask Jeeves, and it blew my mind. That mix of design, composition, layout, and emerging technology really set me on the path toward digital products and eventually productdesign.How do you think your parents, family, or friends influenced how you approach problem solving in your day to daywork?My mum wanted me to be an architect, so during school I did all my work experience in architecture firms. My dad was a mechanical engineer and gave me things like Meccano. I was always taking apart toys or electronics to see how they worked, often trying to rebuild them into something else. That curiosity about how systems are put together has stayed with me, whether Im working on technical products or thinking about how organizations function.Tell us a little bit about your career background?My first job was at Abbey Road Studios, where I worked for about four years as a motion designer, combining After Effects with coding in Flash. After that, I freelanced in the Midlands for clients like Land Rover, creating digital brochures and other design work. Around 20062007, when TechCrunch and startup culture were taking off, I launched my own startup and joined Seedcamp, the UKs version of Y Combinator.When that ended, I focused on designing digital products for companies across Europe. One client was acquired by Yelp, and in 2012 I moved to the US to join a couple of startups before working atGoogle.What notable changes were you and your team a partof?The Pixel Watch was probably the most challenging project I worked on because it was my first time designing for hardware. I joined as we prepared to launch Googles first first-party wearable, which came with a lot of pressure to deliver. I worked on Pixel Watch 1, 2, and 3, and with each release we saw improvements in customer satisfaction, sales, and press reviews. Everyone from PM to engineering to UX was focused on shipping high quality products.What was it like working on such a small interface on Google Pixel Watch & Fitbit?It really forces you to focus on the core value. With so little screen space, there is no room for anything unnecessary. These devices are highly focused tools, mainly for telling time, health and fitness, and a bit of productivity like communication. For example, during a run, someone might only care about their pace or heart rate zone. While there is a huge amount of possible data, the challenge is deciding what is truly valuable in that moment. In some ways, the constraints made the design process easier, because they pushed us to prioritize only what matters most to theuser.Whats one failure or misstep that taught you something invaluable?Oh thats a daily occurrence. Earlier in my career, I got too focused on perfecting UX details and believing my territory is design without stepping back to understand the bigger picturewhat the business actually needed and the value we were delivering to users. Its easy to fight for a transition or animation because it feels like your responsibility, but without that wider context, youre not truly advocating for the rightoutcome.At Google, I learned that design doesnt operate in isolation. Engineering, product, and business considerations all influence the final result, and the most effective designers immerse themselves in all of them. Now, when I start a project or conversation, I lead with understanding the users needs and the business goals. Its a habit that makes every design decision stronger.What are the most important qualities you look for in a design leader?First Ill break it down to leader. For any leader, authenticity is key. Leaders cant always share everything, but being honest and upfront with the information you can give builds trust, people see through sugar-coated bullshit so just tell it like it is. Its also important to make sure people are truly heard. Good leaders trust you to be accountable but are there to support you when you needhelp.For design leaders specifically you have to set a high bar for quality and ambition, this is where setting out a vision is essential. Psychological safety also matters, designers need to feel they can try something completely different without fear of judgement. But alongside that freedom, the expectation of quality should remain high. And when shortcuts are tempting, design leaders should be the ones encouraging and supporting the team to make sure the proposals meet the users expectations.How do you balance business goals with design integrity when theyre at odds?It comes down to understanding trade-offs, not just from your own discipline but across the whole team, and which trade-offs are most likely to produce the outcome you are looking for. Depending on the type of project, you have different amounts of leeway to resolve these disputes. On Pixel Watch, we had a hard manufacturing deadline, once the watch needed to go to the factory, that was it, in other non-hardware projects you might have more of a buffer to find the rightpath.So it really came down to the process running up to that to ensure wed initially aligned on goals / success metrics and a robust testing process along the way. Of course there were always instances where there was not agreement on the trade-off! In this instance, it was about working with your trusted cross-functional partners to summarise and propose in a clean enough way for the next layer of leadership to support a decision.How do you foster collaboration between product, engineering, and design teams?It starts with everyone being aligned on what success looks like. That could be a metric, a set of features, or some other shared vision, but everyone needs to be looking at the same map and aiming for the same destination. Once that is clear, each discipline can develop its own strategy for gettingthere.I do not think you should put significant work into anything until that alignment happens. Otherwise, you risk someone asking for a quick UI change without understanding why it is needed or how you will measure itsimpact.From there, collaboration comes down to working together on strategy and implementation. Skills matter, but so does chemistry. You spend a lot of time with your teammates, so you need people who can work well together and learn from each other. It is a bit like picking members for a band. You need the right instruments, but you also need to jam together and see if the chemistry is there. That is why our interview process involved multiple team members, not justme.What are some ways that you leverage AI in your workflow?I am starting to get back into the making side of things, and AI has been helpful for rapid prototyping. I use it to brainstorm ideas, quickly test them, and see if they are worth pursuing. If they are not, I can iteratequickly.For example, I built a small tool with Gemini and Visual Studio where I can upload all my bank statements, and it automatically categorizes my spending each month and shows whether I am on track. That kind of quick idea-to-working-prototype flow is where AI really shines forme.Prototyping has always been a powerful tool for designers, but there have been many barriers, things like access to real(istic) data, fully knowing the technical capabilities of a platform or figuring out easy ways to host and test. All of these barriers are coming down with AI tools, which is exciting to see to design output getting closer to productionisableleading to faster iteration.What are parts of your job where you find using AI unnecessary or inefficient?I think AI can overpromise and underdeliver by sounding too confident when it comes to understanding a user pain point or problem space. If you are exploring a feature or a specific user base, AI cannot match the work that comes from doing actual UX research. There is no substitute for what a researcher, or a researcherdesigner pair, can uncover by putting a prototype in front of real people and gathering feedback from 10 or 15 participants. You can use AI to help prepare or organize your thinking, but it cannot shortcut the value of genuine user research.When you start on a new design team, where do you spend your time and energy?I always start by introducing myself and explaining who I am and how I work. I want people to know I am fallible, that they should challenge me, and that they should not assume I know everything. Setting that tone early is important.I also like to get a tour of the product. I will ask people to open Figma and walk me through what they are working on. It is not just about learning the product, but about seeing where they are struggling and where they feel confident. If you just ask someone what their challenges are, you often get a surface-level answer. But if you walk through the work and ask about specific choices, you uncover more about how they operate and how the team works together.Ultimately, I spend that early time figuring out where I am most needed. The hiring manager may have hired me for one reason, but the real challenges often turn out to be something else entirely.What are the most common aspects in designer portfolios that bother you?The first thing I look for is attention to detail. A portfolio is created on your own time, without anyone driving you, so every decision is yours. How have you chosen to put your best foot forward? You can tell when something has been crafted with care versus when it is just a few things uploaded to a template. It is not about whether it is custom built or made in Squarespace, but about the quality of the work, how it is photographed, and how it is presented.I do not have strict pet peeves because everyone tells their story differently. You can use a template or a custom site, but the curation and storytelling are key. A common mistake is simply showing the steps of the design process in sequence, such as interviews, wireframes, and final screens, without explaining the impact of your work. I assume you can follow a design process. What I want to know is how you overcame challenges, what insights you gained, and what innovation you brought to thetable.Think of your portfolio as a movie trailer, not your entire life story. Keep it concise, reduce the cognitive load for busy hiring managers, and make it easy for them to find what they need to decide whether to talk to you. At the same time, remember that your portfolio should help you filter out companies that are not a good fit. If creative pursuits outside of work matter to you, make sure your portfolio reflects that so you attract the right kind of attention.Do you have any tips for designers trying to break into the product designworld?This is not a universal tip, but I believe one of the most valuable skills for many designers today is the ability to create working prototypes as part of the design process. That has never been as achievable as it is now. I recommend that product designers get comfortable with a development environment that allows them to quickly build a functioning version of theirconcept.For visual designers working strictly on design systems, this may not apply as directly. But if you are working on features or product development, being able to quickly iterate through working prototypes gives you a huge advantage. It has always been useful, but today it is so attainable that you are at a disadvantage if you are not investing time in making it part of yourprocess.Interview with Ed Lea, former Head of Design at YouTube TV, Director of UX at Google was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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