Context

I rejoined Google July 2014 as a full time employee, working with the Google Domains team.

Google domains was invite only at the time. New users could only join by a code passed to them by other users who joined Google Domains in the past.

My initial work was towards the official launch that came later in January.

The Challenge

It's hard to compete with Go-Daddy, the leader in the Domain Name Registration arena.
ICANN, the Domain Registrar Organization wasn't 100% transparent about their plans and regulations.
Google has a very Eng. focused culture. Many features and business decisions are driven from Eng perspective and not always driven from users requests nor product excellence reasons.

Key contributions

• Main contribution - I was part of a team that built a domain-buy-flow that is implementable in other non-Google sites such as Wordpress, Square, Houzz, Blogger, etc.,

• Allow partners' customers to use our domain-registrar as-a-service without redirecting them to our main Google Domain website.

  • Cross team collaboration with internal partners making sure the other teams are aware of this effort.

  • In particular, we needed to get a Stubby access for Terms of services. Something that is quite technical and doesn't have to do with UX but at the team was busy with other things, I took the initiative and collaborated with the team on the G-Suite side that needed to provide us with the Stubby access.

• Created new experiences and revamped many areas of Google Domains such as:

  • Search experience.

  • Transfer Domain experience - normal domain transfer and Google domain transfer AKA internal transfer.

  • Website offerings.

  • Email offerings.

  • DNS Settings.

• Liaison for the Wahlberg project (new Google logo implementation).

• Ran >25 usability studies on the course of 2.5 years.

Impact

• Acknowledged:

  • "Google Domains Storefront Redesign: check it out at domains.google.com"
    --2018 Feats of Engineering Award winners! The FoE Awards program recognizes the top and most impactful projects in Cloud.

• 3171 domains registered on launch day.

  • I've been holding my breath not wanting to jinx anything, but it seems safe to issue a great, big "hooray!" There'll be more to be said later, but this is a great moment for the domains team and for Google. I'm very proud of what the team has done and thrilled to be a small part of it. --VP of Engineering Ben F.

• More than 300 partners use Google Domain-buy-flow API.

• Customer escalations rate for Domain-Transfer was reduced by 67.73%

  • "And of course the new UI also improves our product excellence, is responsive, works better on mobile etc." --Google Domains - Tech Lead