Google AdWords policy
Lead content designer
Google AdWords, 2015-2017
What I did
The ad policies on the Google AdWords (now Google Ads) platform were a convoluted mess of grandfathered rules and temporary updates documented in sedimentary layers. I joined the initiative to completely revamp them, and I reorganized and simplified the policies so that the rules were easier to understand and policy violations were easier to fix.
After
Organizing through taxonomy
The writing wasn’t the hard part; it was figuring out how to organize such an enormous pile of information. I spent weeks in a series of sprints, creating multiple versions of a taxonomy with PMs and legal counsel, and eventually consolidated all the potential violations to a much simpler list. After that, I spent even more time going back and forth with lawyers about how to turn legally defensible language into terms that users also understand. It was a massive effort, but the results were obvious: We reduced support calls by 150,000/week and reduced response times for appeals from 3 days to 1, all without any additional headcount.