Architecting the future of Microsoft Power Platform: Virtual Agent Chat, and Power Apps

THE CHALLENGE

This project focused on uncovering breakthrough product and service designs, new business processes, and digital ecosystem programs that are anchored in how people want to experience Microsoft products and services in the real world.

The goal of this project was to use human centered service design methodology to understand not just the customers’ interaction with the products, but to get visibility into the situational context and understand how individual product touchpoints are embedded in broader experience arcs.

A key imperative for Microsoft is to shift from delivering individual product experiences to creating integrated ecosystem service experiences that span multiple product lines. At Microsoft, innovation timelines are shrinking and ideation, prototyping, piloting and commercialization are occuring in increasingly rapid cycles at a global scale.

At the same time, customer expectations are fundamentally shifting and there is a critical opportunity to deliver integrated value propositions that look beyond product and are grounded in empathy and the human story and what people (not ‘users’) need and - more importantly - expect.

THE PROCESS

• Products designed for:

  • Automated chat (Virtual Agents)

  • Power Platform

  • Power Apps

  • Power Automate

• Use a human centered design framework and design thinking to create new product and service experiences across a complex business ecosystem that includes multiple products and actors

• Leverage a large quantity of user research and extract insights to surface experience opportunities in the product ecosystem

• Challenge the product experience current state

• Analyze the integration of AI into product design and development

• Surface critical high impact experience opportunities through cross-discipline and cross-department collaboration

• Extract and translate insights from research data to inform innovative product and service experiences

• Work with product and company leadership to develop tactics to implement the new experiences across the current and future customer base

• Employ design thinking and human-centered design mindsets and methods such as qualitative and quantitative user research, personas, ideation, journey mapping, system mapping, service prototyping, and implementation and testing to drive business impact

• Orchestrate new types of human-centered product experiences for key product platforms. Design and intersect business ecosystem strategy and customer experience strategy to realize new value propositions and exponential growth for an enterprise application suite

• Drive organizational change management and transformation. Develop a collaborative research and design culture that opens up new value streams and business models for Microsoft and its customers.

• Work with leadership to run business opportunity assessments and prioritize product opportunities

• Design an experience design process that flattens the silos between research, design, engineering, product managers, and leadership

METHODS

• Service design

• Design thinking

• Cross-functional workshops

• Human centered design

• Storytelling

• Vision stories

• Digital product strategy

• Concept testing

• Service blueprints

• Metrics dashboard

• AI integration assessment

• User research

• Business requirements

• Empathy maps

• Maturity assessments

• Customer archetypes

• Experience maps (current, future)

• Ecosystem design

• Ecosystem maps

• Value network maps

• Key Scenarios

• Stakeholder maps

• Organizational change

• Process design