Designing the Service Experience Ecosystem

This project focused on transforming the end-to-end service experience for Microsoft’s Power Platform ecosystem, including Power Apps, Power Automate, and Virtual Agents, during a period of accelerated innovation and cross-product integration. The goal was to identify strategic experience opportunities that could increase adoption, reduce friction across the ecosystem, and support the internal teams responsible for delivering these experiences.

AI Context (Emerging Capabilities at the Time)
During this work, the Power Platform ecosystem was beginning to integrate early AI-enabled conversational capabilities through Power Virtual Agents. This introduced new opportunities to support user workflows through guided interactions, automation, and natural language interfaces. My role focused on how these capabilities would integrate into broader service experiences, rather than the underlying AI itself. While these capabilities were early at the time, the same design challenges continue to apply to today’s generative AI systems, particularly in how AI supports guidance, automation, and decision-making within complex services.

Working inside a large and layered enterprise context, I applied a systems-level, human-centered design approach that spanned product, service, and employee experience. The engagement moved fluidly between upstream strategy and tactical execution, drawing from design thinking, service design, and UX to create alignment across teams and touchpoints.

Key efforts included:

• Mapping the current state across multiple products and user archetypes

• Identifying high-friction zones and experience breakdowns

• Translating research into integrated ecosystem journeys, service blueprints, and product opportunities

• Exploring AI integration scenarios that felt genuinely useful and human

• Designing collaborative processes that bridged silos between research, design, engineering, and product teams

• Producing prototypes and experience narratives that helped stakeholders reimagine the full lifecycle, from user onboarding to advanced platform engagement

This work went beyond improving interfaces. It reshaped how Microsoft could think about value delivery across tools, teams, and time. It laid the foundation for more coherent user journeys, more strategic internal collaboration, and a product ecosystem better positioned for long-term growth.

Methods & Frameworks

Service & Experience Design

• Service design

• UX and experience design

• Human-centered design

• Design thinking

• Ecosystem and journey design

• Digital product and service strategy

• AI-enabled experience design

AI & Emerging Capability Integration

• AI strategy (experience and service layer)

• AI integration and opportunity framing

• Conversational and workflow-based interaction design

• Assessment of AI impact on user journeys, trust, and decision-making

Collaboration & Facilitation

• Cross-functional workshops
  Co-creation sessions

• Stakeholder alignment and facilitation

• Storytelling and vision narratives

• Key scenario development

Research & Insight Development

• User research and synthesis
  Empathy mapping

• Maturity and capability assessments

• Business and stakeholder requirements

• AI integration and workflow assessments

Systems Mapping & Visualization

• Service blueprints

• Current and future state journey maps

• Ecosystem and system maps

• Stakeholder and value network maps

• Customer archetypes

Prototyping & Validation

• Concept development and prototyping (Figma, Miro)

• Experience simulation and concept testing

• Workflow and service validation

• Metrics definition and dashboarding

• Process and operational design

The Challenge

This project focused on rethinking how people experience Microsoft, not just through individual products, but across the broader systems and services that support them.

At the same time, the platform was beginning to incorporate emerging AI capabilities, introducing new possibilities for how users could navigate workflows, receive guidance, and complete tasks through more intelligent, conversational interactions.

The challenge was not simply to improve isolated user interactions, but to understand how experiences unfold across real-world contexts, and how each touchpoint contributes to a larger, interconnected journey.

Microsoft was shifting from a product-centric model toward a more integrated ecosystem across teams and product lines. Innovation cycles were accelerating, and the time from concept to pilot to launch was rapidly compressing.

In parallel, user expectations were evolving. There was an opportunity to move beyond feature-driven design toward more adaptive, human-centered experiences, where AI, products, and services work together to support real user intent in a cohesive and meaningful way.

The Process

1. Frame the Opportunity

Applied a human-centered design approach to reframe how products, services, and workflows operate across a complex, multi-team ecosystem.

Identified how emerging AI capabilities, particularly conversational interfaces, could shift how users interact with enterprise tools and navigate complex workflows.

Challenged the current state of product experiences and uncovered new opportunities for more guided, intelligent interactions.

2. Conduct Deep Research

Used interviews, surveys, journey mapping, and system mapping to surface actionable insights across the ecosystem.

Focused on high-friction moments in user workflows, particularly where users lacked guidance, clarity, or efficient paths to task completion.

Examined where AI-enabled interactions could reduce cognitive load and better support user intent.

3. Identify and Prioritize Opportunities

Worked cross-functionally to define high-impact opportunities across product, engineering, and operations teams.

Explored how conversational and AI-enabled interactions could support user intent, guide task completion, and reduce complexity across enterprise workflows.

Defined how AI capabilities would integrate into end-to-end service flows, including where automation, guidance, and human handoff were most effective.

Partnered with product and leadership teams to align priorities with both immediate needs and emerging AI-enabled possibilities.

4. Translate Insight into Design

Translated research into service concepts, journey flows, and conceptual prototypes.

Designed experience models that incorporated AI as a supporting layer within workflows, rather than a standalone feature.

Focused on creating experiences that were intuitive, trustworthy, and aligned with both user needs and operational realities.

5. Build and Align the Design Process

Designed a collaborative, low-friction workflow that aligned research, design, engineering, product, and leadership teams.

Established ways to rapidly test and iterate on both traditional and AI-enabled concepts.

Helped teams build shared understanding of how AI could be applied within the broader service ecosystem.

Tool: Service Design Integration Model

This tool is designed to integrate three foundational layers of service design into one connected view: User Archetypes, Ecosystem Maps, and Current State Journey Maps. It creates a shared starting point for teams to understand not only who the end user is, but also how they interact across internal and external touchpoints, and where the biggest opportunities lie along the journey.

By aligning archetype-level insights (what the user thinks, feels, does, and hears) with ecosystem complexity (stakeholders, platforms, systems) and an emotionally annotated journey map, this framework gives stakeholders a structured way to explore pain points, jobs to be done, emotional friction, and service gaps all in one place.

This became a critical strategic artifact for aligning Microsoft product and experience teams around high-impact design efforts grounded in user empathy and organizational systems thinking.

Tool: Service Blueprint with Strategic Prioritization

This service blueprint was created to assess the current experience across key customer stages while integrating business impacts, channels, insights, and job-to-be-done (JTBD) thinking. Unlike a traditional blueprint focused solely on mapping touchpoints, this tool layered in emotional friction, systemic breakdowns, and organizational misalignments surfacing not just what happens, but what matters.

Each column represents a customer stage, starting with onboarding and ending with brand experience. For each stage, we mapped customer behaviors, supporting systems, internal teams, and critical “moments of truth.” Visual markers flagged areas of friction and loss, such as digital gaps or off-brand transitions. The blueprint then identified which of these breakdowns had the greatest business and human impact.

The tool also embedded prioritization overlays highlighting which pain points were primary, secondary, or tertiary priorities for improvement. These priorities aligned directly with a strategic roadmap, helping cross-functional teams focus their efforts and measure progress against high-value outcomes. This blueprint was not just a mirror of the current state, but a springboard into transformation.

Tool: Insight Synthesis Framework

This tool set was designed to distill complex research data into clear, actionable components that teams could use to align around user needs, identify key pain points, and inform product direction. It includes a persona snapshot, an experience timeline with emotional and data indicators, and an ecosystem map that shows how the user interacts with different roles and systems.

The top section maps the user’s current experience across phases like onboarding, implementation, and scaling, while also surfacing emotional highs and lows and areas where data is strong or lacking. The middle section consolidates critical insights including key goals, behavioral drivers, and pain points into a single view.

The ecosystem map at the bottom clarifies who the user depends on and where collaboration or intervention occurs. This helped our team reveal service gaps, prioritize feature development, and ensure design, product, and engineering stayed in sync throughout the process.

It was especially useful in surfacing opportunities to improve cross-team coordination and clarify where new features could create the greatest impact in the broader ecosystem.

Tool: Value Proposition Design Co-Creation Workshops

This toolset combined visual frameworks from Strategyzer with collaborative exercises to help teams co-design meaningful, evidence-based value propositions. The workshops explored customer and employee jobs, pains, and gains, then mapped those against the product’s current and future-state offerings.

We used a sequence of canvases, including the Value Proposition Canvas, Pull-Job Selector, and Experience Maps, to visualize and compare what mattered most to users. Dot voting and emotional scoring helped participants prioritize which gains to amplify and which pains to solve first. Stories and direct quotes were layered in to ground abstract patterns in real human narratives.

The result was a co-created portfolio of value propositions, tightly aligned with both business strategy and user experience. These sessions helped bridge insight and execution by giving product, design, and research teams a shared foundation for innovation.

Collaborative Planning Framework: Driving Alignment Across Functions

Overview:
This lightweight but high-leverage tool was used to bring product, design, engineering, and research teams into closer strategic alignment. It served as a facilitation framework to help teams clarify challenges, prioritize opportunities, and co-own decisions across disciplines.

Purpose:
While most tools focus on the service experience, this one focuses on the team experience, ensuring collaboration doesn't break down across silos. By making collaboration visible and structured, it helped us move from intention to execution with fewer misalignments and greater velocity.

How It Was Used:

• Brought together cross-functional groups to define shared goals and pain points

• Facilitated orientation and test sessions to build team fluency with the tool

• Mapped challenges and opportunities across an impact spectrum (incremental to breakthrough)

• Used collaboratively to inform backlog planning, experimentation strategy, and stakeholder communication

Strategic Value:
This tool may seem simple, but it plays a crucial role in scaling service design within complex organizations. It helps create the cultural and operational alignment needed for human-centered work to stick and succeed.

Final Reflection

This project helped shift Microsoft’s Power Platform experience from a fragmented, tool-centric model to a more connected and human-centered ecosystem. By integrating research, service design, and strategic storytelling, we uncovered overlooked opportunities, clarified product value, and helped internal teams work more cohesively. The work sparked new conversations across functions and set the stage for ongoing transformation, not just in the tools themselves, but in how Microsoft shows up for its users across the full lifecycle.