Security Fluent Extension
Built the 12-person team behind a shared design system for Defender, Purview, Intune, Entra, and Security Copilot.
- Organization
- Microsoft
- Role
- Partner Product Design Director
- Timeframe
- Jul 2023–Jun 2025
- Focus
- Design systems, Portfolio coherence
Extend the Purview system across Microsoft Security while preserving each product’s technical and workflow needs.
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, spanned the M365 and Azure ecosystems, several front-end frameworks, and locally developed design systems.
Customers had to relearn navigation and interaction patterns as they moved between products. Teams also built similar solutions in parallel.
Create coherence without conformity
The Fluent 2 foundation built for Purview provided a working model. SFE gave each product a shared language, explicit standards, and reusable assets that fit its technical constraints.
The system made specialized security workflows easier to understand while preserving their differences.
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 the foundation into AI experiences
SFE extended the Purview system across the Microsoft Security 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. The overlap kept system strategy connected to product delivery and customer needs as the foundation evolved.
Modernize the language without resetting the system
In April 2026, I began leading Lithium, an update to SFE’s design language. SFE had defined a coherent direction across Microsoft Security. Lithium updated its visual and interaction language while preserving the tokens, components, and structure teams could adopt incrementally.
Lithium connects the new design direction directly to tokens, components, and code. Teams can adopt the changes incrementally without replacing the shared structure behind SFE.