matt johnson
google pay
Leading at Global Scale
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Product
Google Pay is a broad-featured consumer payments super-app built for global scale with a distinct offering and business model tailored to each market: pay peers & merchants, earn rewards, and leverage credit/loans.
I led the UX team that launched Google Pay (initially 'Tez') in India, reaching 75M+ MAUs and $43B+ in TPV within a year. From there I led the Singapore launch, capturing 1/3 of TAM and 30%+ of market TPV in just 6 months, and helped shape the expansion strategy for 20+ additional markets.
Opportunity
Google Wallet's Android-native model comes with regulatory constraints that heavily limit its business potential. Google Pay took a stand-alone application approach, built market-by-market, and designed around local partnerships, banking integrations, and regulatory compliance. The strategy unlocked the full potential of Google's payments infrastructure in high-growth markets.
CONTRIBUTIONS
Defined the end-to-end UX of Google Pay India (Tez) architecting for global scalability from day one
Managed multidisciplinary design team of 14 across 4 sites
Creative direction for product, marketing, and events
Represented the user across the full stakeholder spectrum — from in-market growth & ops teams to executive leadership across the Google Payments organization
BIG TAKEAWAY
The art of building product at scale is making the universal feel personal.
DetAils
Company
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Role
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Product UX Lead
Timeframe
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2017 Q2 – 2021 Q3
Google Pay's India launch coincided with PM Modi's 2016 demonetization effort and built in direct coordination with the government's new digital payments rails (UPI). Google Pay's conversational UX quickly rose to dominate India's consumer payments market, reaching 100M+ users and $43B+ in TPV in just over a year.
Leading and managing a full-stack design team of interaction & visual designers, illustrators, content writers, and researchers, I drove early product sprints, coordinated market and user research, and scaled the core experience as the user base exploded. It's success made global expansion of the app one of CEO Sundar Pichai’s next direct priority.
The success of Google Pay India led me to a new role leading UX strategy for global expansion — starting with Singapore and scoping toward 38 new markets.
As UX lead for expansion, I led three parallel efforts:
Google Pay Singapore — Captured 1/3 of TAM and 30%+ of market TPV and nearly 20% of contactless usage within the first 6 months in an already mobile-payment-saturated market
Global Infrastructure — Embedded in a 70:18:5:2 OPS:ENG:PM:UX team fortifying UX and technical infrastructure to launch in 30+ markets, leading up to major plays in Brazil and Japan
Growth & Optimization — Ran a rapid iteration and experimentation program across India and Singapore to optimize funnels and validate UX patterns for global scalability
View the following case studies for examples of leadership in growth: | |
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Google Pay rebranded from the Hindi 'Tez' to a global flagship brand in 2018. In 2020, expansion to a global offering presented a critical brand challenge: preserve the existing 'GPay' acceptance mark for contactless payments while crafting a distinct identity for Google's global digital payments experience.
I designed the new Google Pay app logomark — shepherding it through product and brand standards review across Google's consumer organizations and up to CMO Lorraine Twohill. Working closely with marketing stakeholders, I also produced the assets and guidelines that launched the new identity to the world.
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