A designer’s perspective How can UX Designers and PMs work effectively together? It is common knowledge that the most effective way to leverage a designer’s skill is to involve design early in the process. What is often not clear is the value designers bring to the table (other than creating…

I interviewed John Davenport and Sarah Mangerich on their role as DPMs at LinkedIn, and learnt some interesting facts about their job! A program manager, to put it simply, helps teams move towards a date, goal, or objective. Design program managers (DPMs) focus on initiatives that help the design organisation…

Design for a login page can seem deceptively simple. I spent a considerable part of 2020 designing login and account flows for a social media giant and learnt this: Ensuring successful and stress-free login for the user requires a lot of thought and experimentation! Here are my top learnings, summarized. What is login? …

Case Study: Building an early-stage product using Microsoft’s data platform that surfaces insights to drive behaviour change. Microsoft Workplace Analytics is a product that uses collaboration data from Microsoft Office 365(calendar, emails, time spent on online and offline collaboration, focus time, your top collaborators, etc). …

This is a cut-away from the article, The Craft of Communicating Product Vision’, and includes a sample story line based on the story-arc method. — Lets take an example of an app, Pawsome, which helps pet-enthusiasts find suitable pets to adopt in their neighborhood, using a community model. Skip to step 6 at this point, if you want to continue reading the method. A young man, named Sam, living alone in a town — moved…

A 10-step method I follow to create vision videos for product teams. — Product vision is the goal of the product that creators aim for — it helps provide meaning, creates a shared understanding and direction for the product team. It provides a continuous purpose in an ever changing world, and defines how the product will change the life of the user. The…

Enabling users to create donuts out of dough. — I still remember my first building blocks toy as a kid — blocks of colorful plastic that fit into each other (it was kid-friendly Lego that came in a large yellow bucket) — I spent ever so many hours assembling, breaking apart, and joining again, trying to create something that…

Solving UX problems while dreaming of spice racks and other real-world analogies — Here at Microsoft, we solve a number of interesting design problems. …