An inquisitive storyteller with a knack for engineering and a talent in art, alumna Brianna Doyle ’19 has always been interested in design strategy – she just didn’t know it until she came to USC Iovine and Young Academy. Today, Doyle is a design strategist at Google’s Insight and Innovation team exploring the vast potential of this boundless space we call the Internet in a role that allows her to tap into her creativity and her love of solving humanity’s almost unsolvable problems. So what exactly does a design strategist do? 

Doyle describes her position at Google as “part think tank and part product studio,” collaborating with designers, writers, and engineers to look at problems from a variety of perspectives. Design strategy as a profession is young, growing, and Doyle is well aware of its fledgling state. She also has first-hand insight into how pivotal the responsibility can be. 

“Every team needs a design strategist whether you call it one hundred different things. That role is crucial. It’s more prevalent. More teams will need it,” she affirms. 

Doyle’s job isn’t just about design sprints and pitch decks – it explores and plans for the evolution of society.  She’s examining the transformation and impact of the Internet and how people will navigate their digital lives as the physical and digital continue to become, in her words, “increasingly the same thing.” Much of her research revolves around understanding human experiences and nuances as they relate to online identity, particularly pertaining to her generation – Gen Z. 

Interestingly, Doyle’s path to the Academy was not by design. In high school, Doyle received admission into several competitive engineering schools and was on track to becoming an engineer. Yet, there was an uneasiness in pursuing a degree that excluded her interests in design, film, and business. A chance encounter with an Academy flier celebrating the integration of the arts, technology, and entrepreneurship was pivotal.  

Doyle credits the Academy and design professor Matthew Manos for enlightening her worldview and introducing her to a refined definition of design that paints outside the lines of conventional interpretations of the discipline. It was through his guidance that she developed the vocabulary she needed to identify her professional destiny. 

“There’s that idea that design is not just a visual medium, but it’s a way of thinking. It’s more of a philosophy than anything else. How do you take the creative and expansive side of design and pair it with the analytical side of problem solving? I think at the heart of that is design strategy,” says Doyle.

Now that she’s innovating at Google, Doyle is recognizing the critical need for more intersectional and heuristic thinkers like her. She also makes the observation that people get often pigeonholed by committing to a major, which offers a limited set of skills and career directions. For Doyle, the Academy bestowed the unparalleled opportunity to foster an “expansive ability to apply herself.” She attributes her ability to collaborate and see things from a throng of viewpoints and varying results as a reason she thrives as a design strategist. 

“The way the Academy teaches and equips students with the ability to question and stay curious and look at things from a bunch of different angles, whether it be design or technology or business,” she says. “Being excited by questions and sort of going down a path of ‘what can this lead to,’ as opposed to being definitive in an end point – I think that really shows up in the kind of work I do, which is so future-facing.” 

The future may be a mystery, but there’s a way to embrace it with insight. Technology faces new problems with every passing invention and the way people communicate with it breeds alternate outlooks to reasoning, empathizing, and engaging both digitally and interpersonally. 

As a strategist, Doyle is interested in the everyday emotional aspect of tech and the Academy experience prepared her for a humanist mindset that champions the craft of interconnectivity. Staying curious is an art that Doyle has honed as she’s learned to welcome the unknown.

“As much as we try to organize people and life paths, in the end we’re all dealing with similar problems, emotions, and needs. The Academy got that right in terms of encouraging fluidity in the way we view things, giving us more emotional intelligence and problem solving for any media, for any format … There’s problems with diversity of thought when things are siloed. The Academy embodies and celebrates the fluidity of problem-solving in the real world and human needs as being universal.”

Brianna Doyle ’19 has always been interested in design strategy – she just didn’t know it until she came to the Academy. Today, Doyle is a design strategist at Google’s Insight and Innovation team in a role that allows her to tap into her creativity and her love of solving humanity’s almost unsolvable problems. So what exactly does a design strategist do? Allow her to explain.

From Engineering Aspirations to a Design Strategy Dream Job