Outlook Accelerator

While on the Outlook team, I transitioned from an individual contributer to a manager and team lead, heading up our internal incubator called Outlook Accelerator. Our team consisted of 4 to 5 designers, and we often had several projects running concurrently, giving us the opportunity to divide and conquer as IC designers.

Shipped Products

Out of 5 or so projects, there were two notable success stories: Bookings With Me and Outlook Newsletters. The lead IC designers on these projects were Stefani Weir and Shahil Soni, respectively, with myself and Vanessa Lann also contributing to the products and the design system on which they were built.

Honorable Mention

While Outlook Events never shipped publicly, it has seen a lot of success internally at Microsoft. It continues to see year-over-year growth in its monthly active usage, despite only being minimally supported by our engineering team. This events platform organically found its audience as a result of us consistently meeting with event organizers across the company, to ensure that we were solving their biggest pain points with large event creation and managament. Before I led Outlook Accelerator, Siddhant Mehta unblocked engineering for the first week with his intial designs. I then took over and led as an IC designer on the project, while also having Vanessa Lann, Wayne Sun, Shawn Harrison, and Jay Allison work on the product at various stages.

Design System

While managing the Outlook Accelerator team, I drove the creation of a design system that provided a foundation for each of the projects. There was a delicate balance between respecting the overall Fluent design system as defined by Microsoft and pushing the boundaries a bit on our UI components. Our goal was to create products that felt a bit more modern than some of our users expected, while still being cohesive with the overall suite of products. What this meant was slightly increasing corner radii, introducing some more color where possible, increasing some padding and margins for more breathing room, and incorporating some more delightful animations for common interactions.

Growth Lifecycle

I teamed up with my PM and research partners to help develop our growth lifecycle, providing our teammates across Outlook with a clear process that could allow any idea to turn into a real product. We assigned various leaders across disciplines to sit on a board that would review and approve projects to proceed through different milestones of the process.

Team Ideation & Morale

I leveraged our unique position as an incubation team to introduce some fun activities both within my immediate design team and with our cross-discipline partners. This screenshot shows a portion of our “percolator” brainstorming session, where we combined forces with PM and engineering to prioritize some high-impact, low-cost feature ideas that otherwise would never be prioritized in our backlog.