Gizmo Integration
Overview
Problem:
Verizon's family products existed across multiple standalone applications and experiences, creating fragmented customer journeys, inconsistent design patterns, duplicated functionality, and increased complexity for families managing their connected devices. As the product ecosystem expanded, maintaining separate experiences became increasingly difficult to scale and resulted in customer confusion and operational inefficiencies.
Goal:
Create a unified and scalable family platform that brings Verizon's family products together into a single experience. By integrating Gizmo into Verizon Family, customers would gain one destination to manage their family devices, communication, location, and safety needs while enabling Verizon to streamline future product growth and innovation.
My Role:
Associate Director, Experience Design
Led the product strategy, experience vision, and creative direction for the Gizmo integration into Verizon Family. Built and scaled the design organization from 0 to 7 designers while leading design efforts across 3 product squads and partnering with 13 additional designers and 4 cross-functional organizations.
Pain Points
Growing Tension Between Independence and Monitoring
As children get older, they want greater freedom, privacy, and control over their digital lives, while caregivers remain focused on safety and oversight. This often creates friction around location tracking, screen time restrictions, and parental monitoring.
Fragmented Family Management Tools
Families rely on multiple apps and devices to manage communication, location sharing, screen time, parental controls, and safety. This fragmented ecosystem creates complexity for caregivers and inconsistent experiences across family products.
Difficulty Building Trust Through Technology
Caregivers want visibility into their children's digital activities, while children want opportunities to demonstrate responsibility and earn trust. Existing tools focus heavily on monitoring and enforcement, but provide limited support for collaborative decision-making and healthy trust-building between caregivers and children.
Onboarding Gizmo
The onboarding experience served as a foundational component of the Verizon Family integration strategy. We focused on creating a scalable migration path for existing Gizmo customers, accounting for both Verizon and non-Verizon users with varying account structures and setup needs. By simplifying the transition into a unified family ecosystem, the experience was positioned to support over 3.5 million Gizmo customers while establishing a framework for future product integrations.
Location Tracking
Location tracking is a core safety feature and one of the primary reasons families choose Gizmo. As part of the Verizon Family integration, we consolidated location experiences into a single platform, enabling parents and guardians to manage tracking, geofencing, and real-time location updates from one centralized destination. This approach reduced fragmentation while creating a more scalable foundation for future family products.
Messaging
Messaging represented a significant expansion of Verizon Family's capabilities, transforming the platform from a location and calling experience into a more comprehensive family communication hub. The solution was designed around Gizmo's secure, whitelist-based ecosystem, enabling trusted communication between parents, children, caregivers, and approved contacts while maintaining the safety, privacy, and parental controls that are foundational to the Gizmo experience.
To-Dos
The To-Dos experience was designed to help parents encourage responsibility and build trust with their children through goal-oriented tasks and rewards. Parents can create, assign, and manage to-dos directly within Verizon Family, while children receive notifications on their Gizmo Watch showing the task details and associated reward. By connecting responsibilities with positive reinforcement, the experience provides families with a simple and engaging way to encourage healthy habits, accountability, and independence.
Activities
The Activities experience was designed to encourage healthy habits and active lifestyles through goal-setting and positive reinforcement. Parents can track their child's daily step count, create personalized activity goals, and assign rewards for reaching milestones. By surfacing progress directly on the Gizmo Watch and within Verizon Family, the experience helps families celebrate achievements, motivate healthy behaviors, and foster independence through engaging, reward-based activities.
Outcome
The Verizon Family and Gizmo integration was designed to establish a unified family ecosystem that brings communication, safety, location tracking, and family management experiences into a single platform. By reducing fragmentation across Verizon's family products, the vision was to simplify how families manage their connected devices while creating a more seamless experience for both existing and future customers.
The initiative also laid the foundation for a scalable platform architecture, enabling future family-focused products and services to be integrated more efficiently while supporting Verizon's long-term family product strategy.
Impact
The Verizon Family and Gizmo integration launched as part of Verizon’s broader family safety ecosystem, bringing Gizmo Watch management into the Verizon Family experience.
The launch supported Verizon Family’s milestone of 1 million enrolled customers and helped connect core family experiences across location sharing, arrival alerts, digital boundaries, communication, and activity features.
Verizon Family supported 360 million automatic updates, 251 million personal check-ins, over 589 million miles of family travel, and over 1 billion minutes of Gizmo Watch connection in the prior year. These public milestones highlight the scale of the ecosystem this integration helped support.
What I learned
Leading this initiative taught me that successful platform transformations are as much about organizational alignment as they are about design. Creating a unified vision across multiple products, teams, and stakeholders required strong facilitation, strategic thinking, and systems-level design. The experience strengthened my ability to lead complex, cross-functional initiatives while balancing customer needs, business objectives, and long-term platform scalability.