MANAGER ROLES AT MICROSOFT

Managers’ core responsibilities vary from team to team even within the same company. As a UX manager, my core responsibilities are:

MY TEAM’S SCOPE

I started building my own team from scratch in 2018, in which year many product teams across Azure didn’t have dedicated design and research support. I initiated collaborations with those product teams by first hiring vendor designers and researchers. After collaborating with them for 1-2 years, I was able to establish long-term collaborations.

Now we primarily supports Azure Customer Support Experience group and Commerce + Ecosystem group.

TEAM GROWTH

In 3 years, my team grew from 2 vendor designers to a 22 people multi-disciplinary team. We have at least 1 researcher to collaborate with every 3 designers.

Here are some snapshots that captured how my team has grown year over year.

TEAM ACHIEVEMENT

The most rewarding part of being a manager is to see the people I attracted and retained achieve more after joining my team. Even when I only had vendor headcounts, I tried to hire the best talents as I could. There have been 14 vendor designers and researchers from my team who were converted to full-time roles at Microsoft. 2 individual contributors changed their role to manager successfully.

COLLABORATION MODELS

We have designed different collaboration models to partner with the product teams.

UX PROCESS