Background
Microsoft's Collaborative Agents and Platforms group builds collaboration tools for hundreds of millions of people: Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and more. Quality mattered deeply across the org's 4,700 employees, but Craft wasn't consistently prioritized throughout the product lifecycle. Strong practices existed in pockets, but they were unevenly applied and lacked shared accountability across design, research, content, and engineering.
As program lead for the Craft initiative, I was tasked with changing that, starting with Teams. I needed to align cross-organizational leaders, build shared definitions, and design scalable systems to make Craft a measurable, integrated part of how we ship.
Without standards or tooling, Craft was treated as an afterthought. That meant fragmented experiences, reactive fixes, and missed opportunities to exceed user expectations. This initiative aimed to operationalize Craft through shared language, structured planning, and new review processes, elevating product quality, reducing rework, and building trust with users at scale.
Making Craft Measurable
You can't scale what you can't measure. I created the foundational technical spec for our Craft tooling ecosystem, outlining requirements, ownership models, and review checkpoints for dashboards, work item tagging, and quality signals.
From there, I led design and development of two primary tools. Craft Dashboards in Power BI and Azure DevOps tracked Craft-related issues across the product lifecycle. A new Craft taxonomy for Sherlock (our internal AI tool for customer feedback) directly connected customer signals to our defined Craft categories.
Teams could now see where Craft issues lived, what they meant, and how to act on them.
Driving Adoption Through Storytelling
Tools alone don't create culture change. I co-led a Craft roadshow with senior leaders across CAP and the Craft Council (a coalition of CVPs focused on quality), sharing the vision, tooling, and playbook with partner teams.
We helped leaders embed Craft into team rituals, planning cycles, and review processes. I also organized One Customer Voice learning sessions to democratize access to qualitative insights, enabling cross-functional teams to connect customer pain directly to Craft opportunities.
The goal was simple: make it real, make it relevant, make it theirs.
Embedding Craft in Process
We launched three pilot groups in Teams to test and refine how Craft practices could scale across different product surfaces. I partnered with accessibility and engineering leads to co-design a new Craft-integrated review model, formally embedding Craft checkpoints into the existing accessibility review workflow.
One of the biggest wins was leading the process to establish the first formal Craft OKR in the Teams org as part of strategic planning, plus created OKR guidance for local product teams to define their own KRs that laddered up to the overarching goal.
Craft became part of how we planned, not just how we polished.
Codifying the Practice: The Craft Playbook
To bring everything together, I facilitated a week-long cross-disciplinary sprint with leaders across UX, content, research, engineering, and PM. We shipped the Craft Playbook, a practical guide for applying Craft at every stage of the product development lifecycle. Not aspirational theory. Actionable practice.
CraftFest
To inspire and celebrate this work, I helped lead planning for the first-ever CraftFest: a remote and in-person showcase of Craft excellence across CAP. This was the most significant org-wide event in years. We chose a Hollywood theme to roll out the red carpet for quality.
I assembled and led the v-team behind the event's creative brief, programming, and logistics. Demo booths, lightning talks from leadership, momentum, visibility, and joy for a growing culture of Craft.
Impact and Reflection
This initiative shifted Craft from a loosely held value to a shared, operational practice across Microsoft's collaboration platforms. By defining what Craft means, building tools to measure it, and integrating it into planning and review processes, we laid a foundation for quality to scale.
I learned what it takes to drive culture change in a large, complex ecosystem. How to hold the bar high. How to navigate hard conversations, align across disciplines, and advocate for shipping only what we're proud of.
This was just the beginning, but I'm excited to see how this work continues to shape both products and mindsets at Microsoft.