Files experience in Microsoft Teams
Building file-interaction and collaboration experiences for Microsoft 365
Role & Impact
- Managed a design team that built file experiences in 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 help 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
At Microsoft, I design the OneDrive experiences for Windows and macOS, and build next-generation OneDrive and Copilot features.
Previously, I have managed a team of designers to build file-collaboration in Microsoft Teams, consumer and enterprise versions of Microsoft Lists, and collaboration tools for the Microsoft 365 suite. As a Design Manager, my key goals were to deliver high-quality products and foster a culture of design excellence.
I also designed OneDrive mobile experiences and modernized the SharePoint Metadata Admin Center (part of Microsoft Syntex), laying a design foundation for my team in India.
Beyond product work, I led the Design Internship program and key University Recruitment initiatives, that had a direct impact on our culture and talent pipeline 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 streamlined and optimized 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.
This is part of ongoing work and I can share further details when necessary.
