Design Manager — Depth & Delight Team (Outlook Expressions)

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Project: Leading Design System, Product/User Expressions, and Brand Investments

Situation

Outlook’s complex multi-surface ecosystem required systematic design leadership to scale visual consistency and brand expression. The transition from legacy Win32 client to modern Windows and Web experience created critical need for robust design systems while maintaining product coherence across Mac, iOS, and Android platforms.

Business Context: One Outlook initiative demanded unified visual expression through theming, illustration, and personalization investments. Success required balancing systematic design thinking with brand expression and user delight across diverse user segments.

Task

As Design Manager, I owned team leadership for design systems, visual expression, and brand investments across the entire product ecosystem. My mandate included establishing scalable design foundations while fostering high-performing team culture and driving cross-platform visual unification.

Action

Systems Leadership & Excellence: Applied ownership by personally guiding comprehensive Fluent migration including component audits, token updates, and accessibility compliance. Demonstrated high standards by creating flexible Figma toolkit that enabled cross-platform consistency and accelerated designer workflows. Used invention and simplification to streamline engineering handoffs and reduce design-development friction.

Brand Innovation & User-Centered Design: Showed customer obsession by directing personalization storytelling through theming and illustration that resonated with diverse user needs. Applied think big principles to establish theming frameworks for wallpaper integration, contrast accessibility, and inclusive palette guidance. Elevated product aesthetic toward expressive, human-centered design language.

People Development & Culture: Demonstrated hire and develop the best by mentoring junior-to-mid designers with tailored growth plans, resulting in multiple team promotions. Applied earn trust by defining clear operating rhythms, critique structures, and goal alignment processes. Nurtured team culture grounded in craft excellence, intellectual curiosity, and genuine care for user outcomes.

Results

Organizational Impact: Design system and toolkits achieved organization-wide adoption, dramatically improving consistency while reducing design-developer friction. Delivered measurable increases in specification speed and implementation velocity across all product workflows.

User Experience Excellence: Theming and expression innovations modernized Outlook’s visual language, contributing to measurable increases in user engagement, improved sentiment scores, and stronger Fluent design system alignment.

Leadership Success: Mentorship programs resulted in multiple designer promotions and measurably stronger creative confidence across the team. Team achieved recognition for both design quality and operational maturity, setting new standards for cross-functional collaboration.

Strategic Influence: System design methodologies and team practices directly informed adjacent M365 teams, creating scalable patterns that extended impact far beyond Outlook’s immediate ecosystem.

Cultural Transformation: Successfully shaped not only product outcomes but organizational culture itself—building sustainable tools, processes, and people development approaches that enable continued design excellence across multiple product cycles.