Kai Conragan

I’m a design executive who believes great products begin with curiosity, are informed by data, and shaped by judgment over time. My work sits at the intersection of UX craft, product strategy, systems thinking, and technical invention—often in moments where teams are navigating complexity, growth, and technological change.

I originally trained as a graphic designer and founded a creative agency early in my career—experiences that shaped my sense of taste, craft, and the emotional dimensions of design. That foundation has stayed with me throughout my work, informing how I approach both invention and evolution.

My career spans 0→1 creation and long-term product growth. Early on, I led UX at Metaweb, pioneering design patterns for the semantic web before the company was acquired and the work evolved into the Knowledge Graph. I later spent over fifteen years at Google, including leading UX for Google Search, where I helped guide the product through multiple transformations: from desktop to mobile, from answers to discovery, and more recently into AI-driven and agentic experiences. During that time, I helped scale Search from roughly 100 million daily users to over two billion, while advancing user experience, product clarity, and business outcomes.

As my scope expanded, my focus increasingly turned to building and leading global UX organizations. I’ve led teams across interaction design, visual and motion design, UX engineering, content design, and research, while partnering closely with product and engineering leadership. Much of my impact has come from aligning user insight, design quality, emerging technology, and business goals within complex, cross-functional environments.

Throughout my career, I’ve been motivated by a belief that design is inherently optimistic: seeing what isn’t working and believing it can be better. I’m drawn to the challenge of evolving complex products without losing what makes them meaningful—balancing respect for what exists with a persistent push toward what’s possible. In practice, that means pairing strong judgment with data and insight, relentlessly raising UX quality, and using evidence to inform decisions without outsourcing responsibility to metrics alone.

Looking ahead, I see UX playing an increasingly important role in sensemaking, tastemaking, and stewarding the human experience as AI becomes more deeply embedded in everyday life. I’m most excited by opportunities where design leadership plays a formative role—helping teams scale excellence and guiding products from viability to desirability.

Personal

I grew up in Half Moon Bay, where life was shaped by the raw beauty of Northern California. The ocean was—and remains—the anchor of my life. I spent my youth surfing throughout California and eventually turned to photographing Mavericks, the legendary big-wave break I could see from my house as a child.

Surfing became my first reason to explore the world, taking me to places like Hawaii, Fiji, Mexico, and Costa Rica. Later, I spent more than two years traveling throughout Southeast Asia, where I fell in love with scuba diving. I eventually became a PADI Divemaster, guiding throughout the region, and more recently joined Global Underwater Explorers (GUE) where I'm pursuing technical diving.

Photography has been the through-line. I started by shooting surf, but today I’m just as likely to be trying to capture a bird out my window or setting up a landscape shot while camping. Photography is a way for me to pay attention, to slow down, observe, and appreciate the world as it is.