Product designer @ Microsoft Teams

January 2021 - Present, Suzhou China

Pandemic has fundamentally changed the way people work in a century. The shift to hybrid work mode will continue to impact every business and industry in the post-pandemic era. Microsoft Teams as the fastest growing business application in Microsoft history, allows organizations to accommodate emerging work trends and enable teams to continue thrive.

As a product designer, I am honored to work on a few 0-1 features and design the experience that impacts millions of users. Through careful user research and study, I help to validate product vision and design concepts in early stage. Meanwhile, work closely with engineer teams to ensure bug-free and pixel perfect experience to the market.

Currently I am based in Suzhou China, within the STCA org - CMD China team, a fast growing team started in April 2020. We are aspired to deliver delightful and cohesive experience as part of the Teams family through close collaborations with global partners in Bellevue, Prague and Vancouver.

My main contributions:

Design 0-1 features and validate early-stage concepts

I’ve been working on a few new features on Teams (e.g. 3D Avatars in Teams), and some started from pure product hypothesis due to tight feature delivery timeline. I explored various design solutions to help PMs finalize product requirements, and conducted user study sessions to validate if the product vision and design concepts resonate with users’ mental model. By raising these insights and potential solutions to senior team leaders, I helped to ensure the design concept truly address users’ needs and pain points.

Present design solutions and achieve cross-team alignments

Cross-team collaboration is also a major part of my daily job. During my time working on features such as Video Effects & Filters, Avatars and Mobile Fluid Notes, I presented design solutions to both internal and external stakeholders to achieve design alignment and sign-off. Being an accountable and responsible team member, my work quality and work ethic have been well-recognized by global partners.

Ensure successful design implementation with engineer teams

After taking over the Video Effects feature from our US design partner, I was responsible for bringing it forward to internal trial and generally available stage. By working closely with engineer teams and hosting QA sessions, I led the effort to think through all the edge cases that are not covered in the initial UX spec and push the engineer quality toward pixel-perfect design implementation.

Project planing and time management

Due to tight project timeline and limited team resource, I need to manage multiple work-streams simultaneously to ensure features can be delivered on time. When working on Video Effects feature, we have dependencies on both Microsoft internal partners and 3rd party ISVs, I proactively identify roadblocks and explore potential solutions , and raise up those to senior leaders for bigger impacts.

Due to confidentiality, please contact me directly if you’d like to learn more :)

MSFT alias: anranzhou