As Principal PM Lead, I was responsible for the UX Design for the first implementation of personalization discovery and sync across our portfolio of 7 apps (News, Weather, Sports, Finance, Travel, Health & Fitness, & Food & Drink).

The challenge for Personalization Sync across devices was, Microsoft had no existing concept of a centralized customer database at the time. From meeting with other team leads, I learned the only platform that recognized a customer was the Ads Platform. The project blew up in scope, to manage several aspects of the project as a UX Principal PM Lead.

The approach was incredibly challenging. Extending the Ads platform, identify gaps and issues in both technology and legal (as we could not allow for personally identifiable customer information for privacy reasons). I had regular weekly meetings with the legal team to balance maintaining the privacy of our customer’s information, and while also delivering a great customer experience that would not be full of legal jargon, or a deliberate acceptance of Microsoft Terms. I faced several other challenges as well in this role, which regularly meant I had to keep 7 teams happy with the same UX across our portfolio of apps – and as you’d expect, all teams were not always sharing the “app family’s” POV on consistency of UX. I created UX requirements docs (that at Microsoft get very technical), and would present them to the DEV teams, take questions and defend design decisions.

The results of the feature’s release was exciting. the design and the work of our DEVs delivered a remarkable increase in customer satisfaction in usability tests, as customers no longer had to manually configure their preferences across Desktop, Tablet, and Phone. and increase in app store ratings, sessions per month, and time in app.