Tech Product Strategist | Research Leader | Poet

Lauren Ito is an American Gosei (fifth generation person of Japanese ancestry), product strategy & research leader whose first language is poetry. And second language is the sea.

As leader of AI product strategy and research at Google, Lauren architects industry-first AI experiences with a focus on visual ads, tools, and products that bring ease and affirmation to people’s lives. Notably, she led the first-of-its-kind virtual try-on shopping product portfolio that scaled across Alphabet.

Lauren’s goal is to build at the ‘ecotone’ edges of systems, that power resilient, innovative, and restorative futures for this and future generations.

She loves building at the edges of what’s considered ‘possible,’ and architecting aligned incentives in which everyone wins.

As an artist and organizer Lauren delves into the tensions inherited within diasporic experiences, spanning explorations of American concentration camps, political agency, and the genealogy of home. Lauren’s work has been featured by The San Francisco Public Library, The Seattle Times, Japanese American National Museum, and Nomadic Press. As a 2022-2023 San Francisco Arts Commission Artist Grantee, Lauren crafted a collaborative “love letter to ancestors: past, present and future,” convening Nikkei poets and visual artists to co-create artistic works. She is currently the Artist in Residence for the National Japanese American Historical Society.

Prior to Google, Lauren was a Director of Research and Insights at global design firm, IDEO, where she authored and founded IDEO’s Co-Design Portfolio. She also co-founded and led the Design Collective, a multidisciplinary organization advancing methods for ethical, and responsible design. Her portfolio included crafting the bipartisan, equity-centered strategy for a $350M justice reform investment, the largest in U.S. history, and leading research that founded a digital product innovation lab to design products by, for, and with people choosing career paths beyond a four-year degree.

Lauren’s design philosophy centers co-creative, ethnographic methodologies, which practice design in partnership with people and communities. She believes building with research participants as core collaborators ensures designs are a direct reflection of people’s perspectives, desires, and needs. Her design research and ecosystem building skills have launched of two labs and projects that span portfolios, including the future of work, driving nation-wide political will to support early childhood learning, reimagining accountability in the child welfare system, and expanding racial representation in early childhood literature, to name a few.

She currently lives in San Francisco and can almost always be found by the sea.