How my team builds now
Moving a design org to coded prototypes and agents by going first.
- My role
- Led the org through the change, from 7 people to a peak of 17 across design, developer experience, and content.
Everyone on my team now uses coded prototypes, alongside Figma, in most projects. Agents connected through MCP have become part of our design process. Back in early 2025, I shared a workflow on how to use Blender via MCP and have Claude creating 3D directly. At the time, that was novel and opened up new tools and ways of working across the team. The Task Switcher in Xbox mode came directly out of this shift, proposed and built in code by a designer on the team. Ultimately, I believe in using every tool at our disposal to achieve high impact outcomes.
I was asked to speak at BLEND, an internal conference at Microsoft, in 2025, on some of the creative ways I was learning to use AI in my workflow and across my team. My first plan was to go deep in the weeds of the making process. The consultant running the event, a former Microsoft CVP, told me the audience was too senior for that.
So I rebuilt the talk around a role they'd recognize: the creative director. Agents did much of the work, and each one had a role, from concept artist to composer. About 100 PM and design leaders saw that version, and I later shared it with the whole studio as how I approach creative work.
I put my false starts on stage.
Before I asked anyone to work differently, I tried to vibe-code a game starring my team, and it failed. I recovered by starting from what I knew, world-building and Unreal Engine 5, then layering AI on top. I told that story to a room of senior leaders, failure included, because a clean demo wouldn't have helped anyone learn.
When technical writing and content development joined design, I reframed writers as knowledge engineers who turn expertise into reusable AI skills. Windows Server content moved to AI-assisted authoring and review. When voluntary retirements reduced content headcount, we pushed to capture institutional knowledge as skills.
The habit spread past my team. I demonstrated a Blender workflow with Claude in May 2025, and shared the method through a tutorial and docs site for design teams across Windows and Developer Division.
The team felt it too. Heroes of AI (see it in the Arcade!) replaced a year-end PowerPoint with a playable game, one level per workstream. I built Design Prix during hackathon week, and we played it with my team in a team meeting (also in the Arcade). I'd asked them to use that week to build, so I built something for them. The games in the Arcade are part of this work.
