We Just Won Google Cloud’s Partner of the Year. Here’s What Nobody Talks About.

Last week, my team at Applaudo Studios was named Google Cloud’s Partner of the Year for Public Sector work.

I’m not going to pretend I read that email and stayed calm.

But I’m also not going to do what most people do — post the trophy photo and call it a day.

Because there’s something more interesting happening underneath this award. Something about how good work actually gets built. And what the current state of design, technology, and AI is quietly telling us — if you’re willing to listen.

A little over two years ago, our team started working with the government of El Salvador.

Not a startup. Not a tech company. A government.

The brief: help digitize a country. Build digital infrastructure for millions of people who had never interacted with their government through a screen. Telemedicine. Tax systems. Citizen portals. Real problems that real people wake up dealing with every day.

I was brought in to lead the design efforts in the early stages. Translate chaotic, high-stakes requirements into something a product team could actually build. Something a nurse in a rural clinic could actually use. Something a citizen who had never filed taxes online wouldn’t close in the first ten seconds.

That’s not a design challenge. That’s a human challenge.

Let me tell you what “leading design” actually looked like in the early phases.

It looked like dozens of whiteboard sessions that went nowhere. It looked like user flows getting thrown out two days before a deadline. It looked like realizing that the person who’s supposed to approve the design doesn’t actually understand what a design system is. [Classic.]

It also looked like some of the most meaningful work I’ve done in my career.

Because when you’re designing for a government service — when the end user is a person trying to access healthcare in a country where that access has historically been a privilege — you stop caring about whether the component library is perfect.

You just care that it works.

At peak, we had dozens of people on this. Product managers, engineers, designers, QA, stakeholders. The kind of cross-functional collaboration that looks elegant on a LinkedIn post and feels like controlled chaos in practice.

Almost two years.

That’s the part I want you to sit with for a second.

Not two weeks. Not a sprint. Two years of consistent, patient, hard work from people who cared enough to keep going when the process was messy and the scope kept changing.

I eventually moved fully to the private sector. My role shifted. I went from executing to advising — showing up when fires needed putting out, making sure the design direction held, but no longer being in the room every day.

Applaudo, for its part, formalized this: they built an entire public sector department. Dedicated resources. Dedicated leadership. The kind of institutional commitment that turns a project into a long-term mission.

That decision made the difference.

Now let me say the uncomfortable thing.

A lot of people in the design and tech world are currently anxious.

AI is doing more. Tools are getting faster. The junior roles are disappearing. Senior roles are being questioned. The market is harder. The noise is louder. And a lot of designers are sitting somewhere between quiet panic and loud denial.

I get it.

But this project is proof of something that the current narrative keeps burying.

Incredible things are still being built by real teams.

Not by a model. Not by an AI agent running solo in a browser tab. By humans who showed up, disagreed, aligned, shipped, broke something, fixed it, and shipped again — for months.

AI made parts of this faster. And that’s good. That’s the point. But no AI decided that a telemedicine flow in El Salvador needed to account for users with low literacy and poor connectivity. A designer who cared did.

That’s the work that can’t be averaged.

I also want to say something about geography.

I grew up in a region the tech world loves to ignore. Latin America doesn’t show up in the newsletters. Most of our countries are not on the roadmap. The investors don’t fly there as much. The conferences don’t mention it.

And yet.

We built something that won the attention of one of the largest cloud companies on the planet. We built something that changed how millions of Salvadorans interact with their own government. We built something worth being proud of — not by pretending to be Silicon Valley, but by being exactly where we are, working on exactly the problems in front of us.

Impact has no zip code.

This is the thing I’d tell every designer, developer, or builder who feels like they’re in the wrong place: the best work doesn’t come from the right city. It comes from the right team, the right problem, and the decision to stay in it long enough to actually finish.

I still care about El Salvador’s digital future. And I wish to do something like this for my own country (Venezuela), in the near future.

My role changed. I execute less. But I haven’t stopped caring about the vision of a country where a citizen can access a doctor without leaving their house, file their taxes without fear, and feel like the government is a service that works for them.

That’s not a tech goal. That’s a human one.

And it’s exactly the kind of goal that reminds me why I got into this in the first place.

Not to ship screens. To change something.

It is not perfect yet. There is still a huge room for improvement.

But is’s way better than 2 years ago.

Congrats to the entire Applaudo team.

This one was yours. Every late review session, every design revision, every escalation call — it all meant something.

The award confirms what we already knew.

You can build something extraordinary from anywhere. With the right team, the right problem, and the stubbornness to not stop.

That’s still possible. Don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t.