Security Fluent Extension
Built the 12-person team behind a shared design system for Defender, Purview, Intune, and Entra.
- Organization
- Microsoft
- Role
- Partner Product Design Director
- Timeframe
- SFE: Jul 2023–Jun 2025 · Lithium: Apr 2026–present
- Focus
- Design systems, Portfolio coherence, Organization design
Turn a system proven through Purview into shared portfolio infrastructure—without forcing every product to look identical or replatform.
One business, not yet one experience
Microsoft Security had grown by bringing together product organizations with different histories. Its four pillars—Defender, Purview, Intune, and Entra—were split across the M365 and Azure ecosystems, several front-end frameworks, and locally evolved design systems.
Customers experienced the result as fragmented navigation, inconsistent patterns, and repeated reorientation between products. Internally, teams often redesigned and rebuilt similar solutions in parallel.
Scale the proof, not sameness
The Fluent 2 foundation created for Purview showed a path forward. The goal of the Security Fluent Extension was not to make every product identical or force each team onto the same framework. It was to give products a shared language, quality bar, and set of reusable assets they could adopt within their technical constraints.
That distinction mattered. Coherence had to make specialized security workflows easier to understand—not flatten the differences between them.
Build the organization behind the system
I made the case for dedicated investment, then built and led a 12-person team of designers and UX engineers. A federated group from the four product pillars and horizontal disciplines brought product requirements into the work and carried shared decisions back to their teams.
The system joined a Figma UI kit, coded components, templates, patterns, tokens, iconography, illustration, content guidance, and accessibility standards. An open contribution model encouraged participation; central curation and formal reviews protected quality.
Extend and refresh the foundation
SFE transformed a product-specific success into infrastructure for the broader portfolio. Security Copilot used SFE components alongside Fluent for AI components, extending the shared foundation into AI experiences.
I led SFE from its formal kickoff in July 2023 through June 2025 while continuing to lead Purview. In April 2026, I returned to lead Lithium, a design language refresh to SFE. The overlap kept system strategy connected to shipping reality while allowing the foundation to continue evolving.