Files experience in Microsoft Teams
Building first-class file interaction and collaboration experiences for Microsoft 365
Role & Impact
- Managed a design team that built file experiences for Microsoft Teams
- My team focussed on file discovery, sharing, viewing, and collaboration experiences in Microsoft Teams on desktop
- Brought a research-first approach (qual & quant) to understand product gaps and user needs, to define product priorities and roadmap
- Worked in close partnership with various Microsoft 365 teams such as OneDrive, Outlook, Microsoft Office, and Windows
Work at Microsoft
My current focus areas at Microsoft include OneDrive experiences on Windows and macOS devices and various file management scenarios in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
In the past, I have managed a team of designers that built file experiences in Microsoft Teams, consumer & enterprise versions of Microsoft Lists, and several features for the Microsoft 365 suite. As a Manager, I was accountable to deliver high-quality products and to build a culture of design excellence and better craft.
I have worked on OneDrive for mobile devices and designed the modern version of the SharePoint Metadata Admin Center (part of Microsoft Syntex) as well. A lot of this was foundational work for my team in India.
Beyond core product work, I have led the Design Internship program and several key University Recruitment initiatives, that had a direct impact on our culture and growth at Microsoft India.
Files experiences in Teams
Microsoft Teams has about 300 million users, and a huge percentage of them use files on a daily basis. My team owned the entire lifecycle of a 'file' in the Teams ecosystem on desktop. User jobs for these files include sharing files (from desktop and cloud), viewing files in Teams, re-sharing files, and discovering the files shared.
Some of the jobs we were attempting to simplify included:
- Ways to choose a file to share
- Selecting people to share a file with
- Confidently adding the right file to a conversation
- Securely sharing the file with the right permissions
- Experience of the file recepient
- Discovering and retreiving files at a later time
We worked on streamlining and optimizing these experiences in collaboration with Leadership, Product Management, and Engineering teams. The overall objective of this effort was to win user love through delightful product experiences.
As file experiences in Microsoft span across several products such as OneDrive, Office, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Stream, SharePoint, Windows, and various mobile apps, I worked in tandem with partners across the globe to design consistent and coherent experiences for Teams' users.
✅ Further details of this work can be discussed in a 1:1 conversation, if necessary.
