Roles and Responsibilities
Senior Design Manager
Evaluated the competitive landscape, and conducted conducted in-person ethnographic research and think aloud studies traveling to our customers across the United States and oversees in countries like Copenhagen, Portugal, Mexico, Argentina, and Australia.
Established the product vision in partnership with product, engineering, and go-to-market teams. Assisted in creating product pitches, defining the target customer base, and sharing the vision with the Office365 executive leadership to fund the development of a new product offering.
Successfully created seamless integration points with other parts of the Office ecosystem by closely working with teams such as Outlook, OneDrive, and Office.
Hired and managed a new design team to support the continued growth of the Planner product. Led team to define the interaction model and visual direction for Microsoft Planner across multiple platforms including iOS, Windows 10, and responsive web.
Overview
Microsoft had successfully seized the enterprise project management market with Microsoft Project Client, Project Server, and Project Online. However, in recent years we had witnessed loss of customers to the likes of Asana, Workfront, BaseCamp, Sprint.ly and other lightweight, agile project management tools.
We noticed that our customers were using these light weight project management tools to track their day to day work, and then manually coping the data into Microsoft Project for reporting purposes.
Our goal was to create a new product offering for Office365 that would bridge the gap for customers. With so many task management apps in the digital market, we knew that simply creating matching feature sets would be insufficient to set us apart from the competition. We looked at what delighted customers, and what produced high retention patterns.
The Planner hub is your landing page. Here you get a bird's-eye view of all your plans, with a visual progress tracker for your favorite'd plans.
Each Plan has its own Board, and within each Board is a set of tasks. Tasks can have due dates, assignments, labels, contain documents and pictures with automatic rich image previews, a checklist of subtasks, and ongoing conversations among team members.
Tasks on the Board can be further organized into customizable "buckets", which give you more flexibility to organize and delegate tasks within your Plan. For example as seen below, within the Tanah dance troupe Plan there are buckets representing each dance competition, and each competition in turn contains various tasks such as booking hotels or purchasing costumes. The buckets can be renamed and reordered, and tasks beneath them can be moved across buckets by simply dragging and dropping.
Tasks can be created under each bucket, and basic values such as due date and assignments can be set inline.
For richer editing capabilities, click on the task to be taken to the details pane. Here you can set the status, update the preview image, add documents and checklists, contribute to conversations with team members, and set categories.
While buckets are useful for organizing your tasks, you may also want to view your task breakdown by progress or assignment. In Planner, the "Group By" feature provides you this capability.
The charts offer a visual, data-driven, and interactive representation of your Plan. Here you are able to see the breakdown of tasks by progress and assignment. Click on any section of the bar or donut chart to see a filtered list of tasks. This can be used to filter based on assignment (such as Aesha's tasks, as seen below), or further by progress, such as all of the late tasks in the Plan.
V1 of Microsoft Planner was released on June 6th 2016. It is built as a responsive web app which can be used across devices of all sizes along with an iPhone companion app. Native apps for Windows 10, iPad and Android were also in the works.
View our promotional video and marketing site to learn more about Microsoft Planner - Teamwork Organized!