We all remember the face-plant that was Google Glass. Or the time when, in an infamous fit of over-engineering, Google tested 41 shades of the color blue on ad links to find the most profitable hue. Since then, however, the company has been steadily refining its design strategy to get out of the way and put users first. Last year, Google’s Allo messaging app was an honoree in Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Awards. This year, the company has presented a slate of sophisticated new products—including a range of smart speakers, a globe-trotting virtual experience, and a new interface for communicating via Morse code on smartphones—signaling a design-first sensibility that has earned Google our first-ever Design Company of the Year Award, honoring high-quality, ambitious design work across an organization. CEO Sundar Pichai sat down with Fast Company‘s Co.Design editor, Suzanne LaBarre, for an exclusive interview about how design fits into Google’s overall mission.

Fast Company: Ten years ago, I would not have identified Google as an iconic design company. Was there a moment when you said, “We need to invest in design”?

Sundar Pichai: If you go back to Google Search and the Google home page, design was a big focus—this notion of doing something simple for users that’s accessible to everyone. All those elements were there. But not all products [groups] were thinking through the core tenets of design. As computing started shifting with mobile, that gave us a good opportunity to give a deeper framework for this philosophy across all our products. One thing that was important for me was: Users don’t use one Google product. They may be interacting with many Google products multiple times per day. Technology should be in the background and should adapt to you. Maps is a good example. You open Maps, it’s very intuitive. You understand this is what it should look like. When we built Chrome, we wanted it to be simple. We always had this mantra on the team: “It’s the content, not the Chrome, that matters.” We needed to more systematically do this across Google.

FC: How would you describe the company’s design strategy today?

SP: One element is a focus on the user—not trying to call attention to a product. It’s approachable, you feel comfortable interacting with it. If you go back to the classic Google home page, you could be a Nobel laureate using it or you could be in an emerging market getting internet access for the first time. We want things to be intuitive.

FC: What is the structure of design at Google? Apple has a very top-down structure, with Jony Ive, the visionary, running his design group. Google has incredible designers—Ivy Ross, Matías Duarte, and more—but it doesn’t strike me as being hierarchical.

SP: Google has more of a distributed approach. We have world-class designers across key areas, and the design community is very strong. There’s alignment around shared values and approaches but diversity of thought and opinion. Apple is great at what they do. But we found this works well for us. Because we are building many different products globally, diversity is an asset for us. We have all kinds of people from all parts of the world, and that contributes to the strength here.