Background

Hello I’m Miles Fitzgerald. I focus on developing people, growing teams, and launching human-centered products for the future. I’m currently a Design Director working for Microsoft.

For the last ten years, I’ve worked for technology companies and launched digital products to market. From launching free music services with Spotify to leading the Outlook Design team with over 250 Million monthly active users. It’s been a fun ride.

People
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‍Since 2016, I’ve led and developed teams of designers at Microsoft from New York, SF, LA, Seattle, Vancouver, and Europe. I love seeing my teams grow and feel excited about their work. I use a mix of growth milestones and challenging projects to get the best out of my teams. And I believe that the people I work with make me a better designer, and helping people to develop themselves leads to better designs.

Teams

‍While leading the team for Outlook Mobile Design, I helped launch efforts to increase collaboration across 3 remote design teams. I encouraged our team of 14 designers to share their expertise and work together more to improve team culture and process. We made changes to our processes: establishing regular communications between teams, streamlining our toolkit and workflow, and creating a central location for all our principles, process changes, and resources. The result was a coherent team developing a coherent product across different platforms. You can read more on this in this article I wrote.

Products
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I’m very fortunate to be positioned as a member of the innovation team at Microsoft. Right now, I’m designing future products with a focus on experiences on different platforms. Most recently, I led a group of designers across Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Yammer and Teams to land the first version of Dark Mode for Microsoft Mobile, and I led the Email vision for Microsoft’s latest device: The Surface Duo. You can read more about this here. 
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If you want to stay up to date with my latest projects, the best way is to sign up to my newsletter here. I’m not active on social media and I’d rather connect 1:1 if you want to chat.