Ryan Spohn

About Ryan Spohn

I\'m a product designer and UX design manager with 20+ years building products and teams at Google, Salesforce, and startups. I design, and I build: I prototype in code and ship alongside my team. Co-created the Lightning Design System at Salesforce. 100+ shipped launches. Three acquisitions. One company co-founded. Currently leading design strategy for Google Drive\'s AI transformation, defining interaction models for capabilities that don\'t have established conventions yet. PM directors and engineering leads trust me as a cross-functional partner because I think across their frameworks, not just my own. For nearly a decade on Drive, I\'ve led design across enterprise products, AI features, and cross-platform experiences. As an IC, I led Information Governance UX and drove Drive Labels from Beta to GA, unblocking a 9-figure enterprise contract by addressing a flagship customer\'s non-negotiable security requirements. As a manager, I assumed Director-level responsibilities in Q4 2024, scaling to 14 direct reports and 25 concurrent projects across 6 product areas. I oversaw 26 GA launches in 2023 and 85 in 2024. A peer described this period as \"translating chaos into concrete, record-speed delivery.\" I studied Industrial Design, which taught me to think in systems, work across constraints, and keep people at the center. I spent ten years at five startups, co-founded one, and helped drive three acquisitions by doing whatever the company needed: design, code, customer support, and admin work. At Salesforce, I led mobile design and co-created the Lightning Design System. Each chapter built a different muscle. Together, they\'re why I partner credibly with engineering and product, earning trust by understanding their constraints and speaking their language. What I\'m most focused on now is the design problem at the center of AI: helping people calibrate trust in systems that are confident by default. Most AI interfaces feel authoritative regardless of accuracy, and users have few tools to evaluate what they\'re told. I believe that for AI to earn trust, it must be useful, interpretable, and aligned with human intent. Design is how you hold that line. That\'s the work I want to do next. I also build with AI tools outside of work: my Family Briefing Agent is a production-deployed autonomous coordination system using Google ADK + Gemini, running nightly on GCP.Outside work: board sports, meditation, and whatever book on consciousness, epistemology, or philosophy of mind is rewiring my assumptions this month.Open to work in San Francisco Bay Area & NYC.

Experience

1. Ux Design Manager, Google Drive

   Google

   Oct 2021 — Present · Boulder, CO, US

   Design strategy lead for Drive\'s AI investments, defining AI-native interaction models for a billion-user platform- Authored the foundational UX brief for AI Mode, reframing how users find and recall information in Drive. Took the MVP from pitch to internal testing in under two months and secured SVP-level buy-in for a dedicated immersive analysis view. Ran cross-functional design sprints shaping Drive\'s 20••••26 AI roadmaps- Drove a 17% increase in AI 28-day MAU through Homepage Inline Summaries and directed Help Me Organize to Alpha with a 96% user helpfulness rating. Shipped Mobile Homepage redesign (40% hit rate increase, 2.5x engagement), file selection improvements (~80% CTR, 3x time reduction), Mobile Scanner improvements (20% scan increase, Pixel 8 feature), and the Drive video player serving 8M views/day- Assumed Director-level responsibilities in Q4 2024, scaling from 6 to 14 direct reports and 12 to 25 concurrent projects across 6 product areas. Oversaw 26 GA launches in 2023 and 85+ in 2024, exceeding delivery benchmarks both years. Team\'s accessibility remediation won back a $17M enterprise contract renewal- Built functional prototypes in code to validate direction before committing engineering resources, including a Chrome extension emulating AI Mode pre-launch and responsive Gemini-in-Workspace typography behavior. Maintained 100+ design critique reviews (~50 hrs) annually as a hands-on craft leader. Team managed the Drive Figma component library with ~700K+ insertions used by 170+ teams across Google per year- Supported 3 direct report promotions in 2024 and 5 additional since 2018. Manager survey scores consistently among the highest at Google- Co-facilitated \"Hopeful Futures\" workshops helping designers evolve their roles in the age of AI. Currently implementing a team-wide AI literacy program covering LLM fundamentals, non-deterministic design, agentic patterns, and eval integration.

Education

• Columbus College of Art & Design

  BFA, Industrial Design

  1997 — 2002

Skills

• Polished Visual Design
• User Experience
• Design Systems
• Responsive Design
• Web Design
• Ipad
• Site Maps
• Iphone
• Ios
• Graphic Design
• Html
• Usability Testing
• Functional Specifications
• User Experience Design
• Rapid Prototyping
• Mockups
• Omnigraffle
• Task Analysis
• Information Architecture
• Mobile Design
• Color Palette
• Android
• Visual Design
• Mobile Devices
• User Interface
• Wire Framing
• Rapid Iterative Testing and Design
• Interaction
• User Interface Design
• Agile
• Designs
• Prototyping
• User Scenarios
• Style Guides
• Css
• Web Application Design
• User-Centered Design
• Prototype
• Experience Design
• Wireframes