Understanding Growth - Microsoft Teams


Microsoft Teams — Designing Human-Centred Growth at Scale

During the rapid shift to hybrid work, Microsoft Teams experienced unprecedented growth, placing intense pressure on onboarding, discoverability, and long-term engagement. The challenge was not driving adoption, but ensuring that rapid growth translated into sustainable, inclusive use without overwhelming users.


The Challenge


Millions of new users were joining Teams with varying levels of technical confidence, accessibility needs, and work contexts. Poorly designed growth mechanisms risked increasing cognitive load, notification fatigue, and exclusion at scale.

The design problem was to support adoption without creating burnout, while ensuring accessibility and usability across diverse enterprise environments.

My Role


Senior Design Consultant, leading end-to-end design for user growth initiatives during a maternity cover engagement.
I partnered closely with product, engineering, accessibility, and data teams to shape growth experiences grounded in human-centred and inclusive principles.

Design Approach


Data-informed, human-centred decision-making

Telemetry and cohort analysis were used to identify friction points such as onboarding confusion, feature overload, and notification fatigue. These insights informed targeted, contextual interventions rather than blanket prompts.

Progressive onboarding and discoverability

Designed role- and context-aware onboarding flows that introduced functionality incrementally, reducing initial complexity and improving first-week success.

Accessibility as a first-order constraint

All new flows and components met WCAG 2.1 AA standards. Patterns were designed in close collaboration with accessibility engineers to support screen readers, keyboard navigation, and low-vision use cases, improving usability for all users, not just those with declared needs.

Impact

  • 40% improvement in onboarding success rates in beta cohorts

  • ~20% increase in daily active engagement across key segments

  • 18% uplift in 30-day retention among new adopters

  • Design approach referenced internally for addressing digital overload and burnout risks at scale

Why It Matters


At enterprise scale, design decisions can unintentionally amplify fatigue, exclusion, or misuse. This work reinforced the importance of using data to support human judgment, designing growth responsibly, and treating accessibility as a foundation rather than a feature.