Youtube
Project Overview
I embedded with YouTube’s Paid Digital Goods team across three concurrent workstreams: the core live gifting experience and it's future (under NDA), Dog Day gifts, and the platform’s first AR gifts. I partnered with product, engineering, and UX research, and ran the weekly meetings that kept those groups aligned. Two of the three projects shipped.
Challenge
For Dog Day, I led the design process for a set of seasonal gifts, generating, editing, and validating the assets before handing them directly to engineering. Alongside that, I saw that the AR gifts project needed design support and volunteered to join it, leading the testing and prototyping phases. For the core gifting experience, I led interaction design exploration across three milestone builds and worked with UX research through multiple rounds of validation. Detailed designs are protected under NDA, but I’m happy to discuss my contributions and process in interviews.
Results
The Howling Husky, one of the Dog Day gifts, became the #1 gift on the platform and drove 9% of YouTube’s gifting revenue in August. It has since been converted from seasonal to evergreen. The AR gifts launched in August 2025 as the platform’s first, with two shipped, and my work appeared in the official design review and internal documentation.
Of YouTube’s August gift revenue
Gift on platform