2020 to 2021 was the most challenging yet formative period of my career. I led the Uber Eats Merchant team through crisis, all while learning how to be a manager for the first time.

### A moment of crisis

In April 2020, I joined Uber Eats from Google as an individual contributor, looking to learn new skills and move faster. And I did, but in ways I hadn't at all expected. The Covid pandemic was just starting to affect tech companies, but no one had any idea what we were dealing with yet.

I was told that I'd have to wait a couple weeks to meet my new coworkers in person. Those couple weeks became a year.

From there, things only escalated. A month into my tenure, in response to the changing market, Uber announced [layoffs and shut down longer term efforts](https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/18/21262337/uber-layoff-3000-employees-covid-19-coronavirus). The layoffs majorly affected the design team, including our head of design.

The pandemic caused Uber's market demand to shift abruptly from rides to food delivery. But the Uber Eats business was still not profitable. The remaining Eats team was asked to halt long-term efforts in favor of urgent business optimizations. Sensible, but ultimately creatively frustrating.

With morale at a low, much of the design team left the company in the following months. In the fall, each of the Uber Eats design managers left in quick succession.

It was at this moment that I was asked to step in and manage the Merchant team. I said yes. The team needed a leader with some continuity, and who was I to turn down a good personal challenge?

### The personal challenge

Well, it was suddenly on me to keep the team afloat, and I had no idea how.

```cv
gallery
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```

As an introverted, typically fairly independent designer, I wrestled with a lot of self-doubt about whether I was fit to lead people. It was reassuring to realize that my motivation was right: I care deeply about people and their careers.

But even caring that much made things tricky. Bad product decisions can be easily iterated upon, but bad management can disorient real people's careers. It was paralyzing.

I didn't have much mentorship from within the organization, so I ate up whatever books and podcasts I could find. And then, eventually, I got over my risk aversion and tried a lot of things. Some worked, some didn't, but I learned from them all.

Over time, I figured out how to best lead the team and I learned to love it.

### Troubleshooting

The team had a lot of concerns. Figuring out where to focus my energy was a little like product development: user research and prioritization. I spent lots of time listening to the team about their concerns, both individually and as a group.

```cv
gallery
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```

Some recurring themes emerged: staffing, belonging, pride, and recognition.

These themes gave me focus in these initial crisis months and continued to influence my work throughout my two years managing the team.

### Staffing

**The issue:** The team was critically understaffed. The team had been 10 when I had joined in April, but by the time I inherited the team, we were down to 4.

My approach here was twofold.

* **Hiring:** I jumped head-first into the hiring process. The recruiting team was even more understaffed that our team, so I did whatever I could to accelerate the process. I created our [read.cv team page](https://read.cv/teams/ubereats.design) to widen our sourcing funnel. I took on the initial portfolio screens that recruiters typically do. I wrote talking points for conversations with candidates. I created guidelines on evaluation for interviewers. Working this way, I relatively quickly scaled the team to a healthier size of 7.

* **Workload management:** While we addressed hiring, I set expectations with product managers that we wouldn't be able to support all the work they'd planned. I provided guidance to designers around how they could "own their time": determining the relative priority of their projects and communicating their needs to their collaborators.

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FNV3Dn6tZccTNDYiUu02GtNnJDor2%2F0xPRM2pRVsym0rxCRn4K%2F5f1c35ca-761f-4e13-8291-439e7710cee5.png?alt=media&token=f094579a-d97f-4192-b019-b46a51725400","id":"5f1c35ca-761f-4e13-8291-439e7710cee5","width":1200,"height":956,"filename":"FcPwY4gWYAIwD20.png","type":"image/png","caption":"Guidance on prioritizing projects in moments of scarce resourcing","border":false}]}
```

### Belonging

**The issue:** With each designer supporting a different part of our product portfolio, they didn't know what one another was working on. And as new designers joined the team, they didn't know one another as people, either.

```cv
gallery
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```

* Early on, I ran a little "virtual offsite" that established a space of trust and vulnerability: sharing about our skills, preferred ways of working, and personal backgrounds.

* To combat the transactional nature of remote work, I started up a social hour every Friday for the team to play games and chat about the weekend. Once we were able to return to the office, this evolved into coordinated in-office days and lunches.

* I evolved our critique format to include both lightweight sharing for visibility and deeper discussions.

* As the team grew to a more sustainable size, I found opportunities to allocate multiple designers to larger projects: not just to make the work better, but to encourage learning from each other.

### Pride

**The issue:** Because of the company's focus on business optimizations, the team was having to ship pared down MVPs that they weren't proud of. With each team of product managers and engineers focused on a specific part of the project, only the design team was noticing inconsistencies in the product.

* On the most important projects, I upheld a high quality bar, providing direct and detailed feedback.

* I influenced the Merchant org to make time for cross-platform initiatives, such as a redesign of our navigation.

* I started a little design systems squad to standardize our patterns. While we didn't have the resourcing for a dedicated team, I identified designers who were eager to carve out time for this sort of work.

### Recognition

**The issue:** The team felt overlooked within the company - that the company wasn't paying attention to the Merchant org and the Merchant org wasn't paying attention to design.

* In conversation with the rest of the Merchant org leaders, I identified areas where the design team could provide unique proactive value to the org. This culminated in me leading a design sprint to identify a 3-year vision for our product suite

* I took every opportunity presented to raise awareness within the company about the Merchant org - such as speaking about our work at a company all hands about our users' pain points and our solutions. My advocacy, along with others', contributed to raising the visibility of merchants among the Uber's top leadership.

```cv
tweet
https://twitter.com/jjtan87/status/1465772801097449481
```

### Conclusion

The Merchant Design team weathered some very challenging times together through mutual support, adaptability, and above-and-beyond ownership. We came out the other side healthier, tight-knit, and high performing. I'm immensely proud of the team.

For me, it was a crash course in leadership that made me into the person I am now - emphasizing autonomy, ownership, gratitude, and support.

Rebuilding the Merchant Design team

Chrome Home was an ambitious redesign of mobile Chrome's main UI. It brought Chrome's toolbar to the bottom of the screen and turned it into a peeking panel that could be swiped to expose additional controls.

```cv
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```

I created the original concept and pitch for Chrome Home in 2016. It was based off two insights:

1. Phones were growing in size, and we had opportunity to innovate in creating a gestural, spatial interface that would still be usable with one hand.

2. Mobile Chrome was also growing in features - but because its minimalist interface kept everything behind a "three dot" menu, these features were underutilized and hard to access.

The idea caught traction internally, eventually becoming a Chrome org priority. I then led a team to execute and iterate on the concept. Executing on Chrome Home required rethinking not just the toolbar, but almost all of Chrome's UI: search, bookmarks, tabs, prompts, etc. To inform our decisions, we used a variety of prototyping and testing approaches of increasing fidelity. Ultimately, such a fundamental change to a web browser required nothing short of building it into the product and testing it in longitudinal studies and live beta experiments.

We heard a mixture of reactions. The feature gained a cult following among the tech community, but for many mainstream users, the change felt disorienting. Chrome serves billions of users around the globe with varying tech literacy. Over the course of many iterations, I became increasingly convinced that launching Chrome Home would not serve all our users well.

So just as I strongly as I had pitched the original concept, I advocated for us to stop the launch - which took not a small amount of debate.

Chrome Home lives on as a lesson for both myself and the whole Chrome team about the intentionality needed to innovate within a product of massive scale. Some might argue that we never should have tried such a thing; others might say that we should've seen it through. The approach I took here is one I stand by: try boldly, but be willing to listen to users and question yourself.

Oh, and [Safari in iOS 15](https://9to5mac.com/2021/06/07/how-safari-in-ios-15-works/) picked up some similar ideas and criticisms.

Chrome Home

Uber Eats Manager is the web dashboard that merchants use to manage their presence on Uber Eats. I stewarded its steady evolution over 2 years.

**All of the hands-on work below was done by the small but amazing team of designers I managed.**

My role was:

* Advocating for designers' good ideas

* Being a thought partner in discovering better ideas

* Upholding quality through design reviews

* Coaching designers on presenting and decision-making

* Catalyzing platform efforts around navigation and design systems

* Connecting the dots between projects to ensure a cohesive platform

A glimpse of some of my favorite improvements we made:

## Onboarding

The first couple months on the platform are a sensitive time in which our users are learning about our product and evaluating if it's meeting their expectations.

It used to be that when a merchant joined Uber Eats, we'd greet them with a bunch of empty charts.

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FNV3Dn6tZccTNDYiUu02GtNnJDor2%2FumzgS76rXF5JejXEuEWr%2Fc594d73e-2f9e-43c8-ae10-1a0298267e30.png?alt=media&token=65b94b67-9811-413b-b1bf-b0c18be5b8b6","id":"c594d73e-2f9e-43c8-ae10-1a0298267e30","width":2560,"height":2400,"filename":"Single-Loc Home.png","type":"image/png","caption":"","border":true}]}
```

We created a brand new first-time experience with visibility of important setup steps which previously were only communicated through emails and support interactions.

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FNV3Dn6tZccTNDYiUu02GtNnJDor2%2FumzgS76rXF5JejXEuEWr%2F97696a95-a318-416d-b5a3-5d3898445414.png?alt=media&token=fc4a1cbf-39cb-426e-b7c3-32868897c749","id":"97696a95-a318-416d-b5a3-5d3898445414","width":2560,"height":2400,"filename":"Large.png","type":"image/png","caption":"Designers: Lauren Wang, Sharon Yu, Diana Arteaga","border":true}]}
```

We created a tooltip system for guiding new users through key features.

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FNV3Dn6tZccTNDYiUu02GtNnJDor2%2FumzgS76rXF5JejXEuEWr%2Fdd4df15b-6cbd-4387-b935-c87824692db7.png?alt=media&token=4a02c397-c0dc-4f82-bc26-b1dbd2dca37b","id":"dd4df15b-6cbd-4387-b935-c87824692db7","width":2560,"height":2400,"filename":"Frame 94542.png","type":"image/png","caption":"Designers: Sharon Yu, Diana Arteaga","border":true}]}
```

## Core experience

The product's navigation used to be a flat list, which didn't scale as functionality grew to 17 pages. Organizationally, there was no single owner of platform-wide UI like the navigation.

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FNV3Dn6tZccTNDYiUu02GtNnJDor2%2FumzgS76rXF5JejXEuEWr%2F64375f84-15ea-438c-a839-468782aaa11a.png?alt=media&token=8335402c-e756-4958-9704-88e108872f23","id":"64375f84-15ea-438c-a839-468782aaa11a","width":2560,"height":2400,"filename":"Single-Loc Home.png","type":"image/png","caption":"","border":true}]}
```

Within the design team, I started a working group to own the platform. We restructured the navigation to a group hierarchy, informed by research on users' mental models.

On the home page, we overhauled our approach to analytics - contextualizing ratings through comparisons to similar merchants and introducing personalized recommended actions.

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FNV3Dn6tZccTNDYiUu02GtNnJDor2%2FumzgS76rXF5JejXEuEWr%2F75ec814b-bb22-45fb-82ae-1852aed4f421.png?alt=media&token=bf51aaac-bf58-420b-845c-27224990093d","id":"75ec814b-bb22-45fb-82ae-1852aed4f421","width":2560,"height":2400,"filename":"Frame 93416.png","type":"image/png","caption":"Designers: Leslie Luo, Sharon Yu, Constance Cerf","border":true}]}
```

## Payments

Naturally, one of the most important needs for our users is understanding their earnings. We aimed to drive transparency and control.

We introduced a much more granular breakdown of payments and fees.

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FNV3Dn6tZccTNDYiUu02GtNnJDor2%2FumzgS76rXF5JejXEuEWr%2F29d726be-c05f-4e97-b642-0ff41b273eae.png?alt=media&token=aba821b6-434a-49bf-9772-d9832d308725","id":"29d726be-c05f-4e97-b642-0ff41b273eae","width":2560,"height":2400,"filename":"Payments 2.0.png","type":"image/png","caption":"Designers: Juan Ayala, Constance Cerf","border":true}]}
```

We introduced an in-product flow for disputing inaccurate charges for missing items, etc. - which previously required calling support.

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FNV3Dn6tZccTNDYiUu02GtNnJDor2%2FumzgS76rXF5JejXEuEWr%2Fd87c4bbc-975a-43ef-b5c6-1b536d25f9a4.png?alt=media&token=a57c4b77-6bec-46db-8146-6a2d0c9e85a8","id":"d87c4bbc-975a-43ef-b5c6-1b536d25f9a4","width":2560,"height":2400,"filename":"Orders.png","type":"image/png","caption":"Designers: Sharon Yu, Constance Cerf","border":true}]}
```