In August 2025, a major reorg reshaped the Power Apps organization, and I stepped in as Design Lead for the newly formed Developer Agents team. Nothing existed on day one.
There was no inherited design, no established product surface, no settled team structure, and no shared definition of what "good" looked like. The business had decided to pivot from legacy Power Platform experiences due to their pre-agentic backend architecture, which was riddled with complexity and outdated code. A 0-to-1, AI-first product built on an agentic harness would let the organization ship faster, experiment in production, and learn from real customer data. It laddered directly up to Charles Lamanna's white paper, Changing How We Build.
The mandate was bold: an enterprise-grade app-building experience where four specialized agents, Requirements, Data, Solution, and Code, work together to turn a maker's intent into a functional, enterprise business app. The window was about three months, with Private Preview on the PPCC keynote stage in October and Public Preview at Ignite in November.
My role went beyond owning a slice of UX. I led design, content, and user research strategy for a team of eight designers, and I was accountable for the coherence of the end-to-end experience: aligning designers across parallel workstreams, connecting design direction to Product and Engineering realities, and helping a brand-new team find the rhythm and confidence to ship together.
The core challenge was ambiguity at speed. The organization had shifted overnight to a start-up mentality of shipping fast and asking forgiveness later. Every decision sat somewhere between the deadline and the quality bar.
Four things were in motion at once.
Ownership across a matrixed Design, PM, and Engineering organization was still being worked out after the reorg. We'd previously relied on formal structure: experience reviews, ship room reviews, and leadership buy-in at each gate. The pressure of the moment called for something far more agile and fluid, and nobody had built that muscle together yet.
We had to decide what the experience was while building it. Information architecture became the crux. We landed on three primary buttons: Plan, Data, and App, and how a maker moved between them shaped everything else. I led the information architecture myself as a super IC. It absorbed many rounds of iteration, backed by rapid user research, and a lot of churn from leadership before it settled. What shipped was welcomed by customers and senior leadership alike.
We were learning in real time what generative models and multi-agent orchestration could reliably do. Design couldn't stop at the interface. We had to understand model behavior closely enough to know which experiences we could promise customers and which needed to wait.
AI changed what quality meant. A beautifully designed interface could still produce an inconsistent generated app, so "good" had to cover far more than the screens we drew.
A beautiful interface covered two of them. The other five lived in what the agents generated and how they behaved.
Early evaluations were candid about the gap. An early November model evaluation described the initial app-generation scores as "quite red."
So Design leaned in across the end-to-end model evaluation process, taking a holistic, multi-pronged approach to reach the highest model quality we could. Before output, design taste briefs shaped what the models generated. After output, through Projects Crucible and Chisel, designers ran offline human reviews of generated apps and established research-backed UX evaluation criteria to improve the computer-use agent's output. We partnered closely with Engineering to build internal grading tools too, including a side-by-side app arena where reviewers voted between generated apps. Together, this moved the conversation about model quality from opinion to evidence.
We weren't just designing screens. We were helping define what good meant for an AI system whose orchestration, outputs, reliability, and UX all had to work as one.
Rather than trying to solve every problem myself, I focused on creating clarity at every level. Four moves became the operating system behind the product.
I used design storytelling and tangible prototypes to align cross-disciplinary partners on one end-to-end vision, which gave each workstream a larger narrative to build toward. I presented it at the Power Platform planning session, where it drew applause; Leon Welicki, VP & GM of Power Platform Core, called it "stunning" and "very well done." That early buy-in made collaboration and execution smoother across Engineering and Product. Inside the team, I led a values-based brainstorm and co-created a team mission statement, so we had shared principles to hold onto when the pace got hard.
I split the team into squads, each owning an area of the end-to-end, and set up triad structures that mapped responsibilities across our Design, PM, and Engineering partners. I traded heavyweight gates for an agile rhythm of six weekly cadences, including Big Picture syncs, Wall Reviews, Quality Reviews, and pair-coding sessions. People could move quickly without stepping on each other.
Through Project Phoenix, we moved away from sequential handoffs. Designers paired in real time with the engineer coding their design, getting pixel-level details right in production code and removing the need for most formal design reviews. Using GitHub Copilot, engineers generated about 20% of production code directly from design mockups, reducing dev cycle time by 15%.
I also mentored the team into designing with generative AI. Figma Make prototypes showed animation and interaction far better than static frames ever could, and they compressed the path from design to production. Multiple engineering managers called the design collaboration the best they'd ever had.
Every week, I ran a Weekly Quality Review: a cross-discipline bug bash with most of the design team alongside partners from Product and Engineering, focused on overall product quality. Together we went through the product end to end and examined the UX, UI, content, and interactions, so that whatever we shipped to production met a high quality bar. It made quality a shared habit across disciplines rather than a final gate owned by one reviewer.
The whole product, end to end, through four lenses, so whatever reached production met the bar.
About two months after the team formed, the new experience debuted on the PPCC 2025 keynote stage and opened to customers through an Early Access Program. Demand was immediate.
“Blown away already. Impressive and polished.”
Early Access customer, Network Rail
“I'm genuinely loving vibing with the experience.”
Ryan Cunningham, CVP, Power Platform, after the PPCC keynote
Private Preview wasn't the finish line. We onboarded participants through a dedicated Teams channel and scheduled structured follow-up sessions, so every week of preview fed the next round of design and model work.
Moving toward Public Preview meant facing hard reliability numbers head-on. In early November, end-to-end success rates looked like this, with 55 Public Preview bugs tracked and 13 of them P1.
At the same time, we stood up vibe.powerapps.com as a standalone surface: domain and service setup, identity, an automated build and release pipeline, regional deployment, partner dependencies, and compliance, all on the path to Ignite.
“Power Apps doesn't just know what you want to build, it understands why.”
Ryan Cunningham, Microsoft Power Platform Blog, Nov 18, 2025
In about three months, a newly formed team went from a blank canvas to a product in thousands of customers' hands. The practices outlasted the launch, too: AI-first design, model evaluation, and design-engineering pairing became how the team kept working.
Starting from nothing taught me that on AI-native products, much of the leadership happens between the workstreams. It means turning ambiguity into ownership, linking vision to detailed execution, making sure separate features add up to one experience, protecting craft while keeping pace, and building ways to measure model quality instead of debating it.
It also changed how I see Design's role. Building AI experiences pulls designers upstream into product framing and downstream into model behavior, evaluation, and implementation. Design can contribute more than artifacts. It can supply the connective system that helps a multidisciplinary organization move as one.
Most of all, it confirmed the kind of leader I want to keep becoming: one who creates clarity without shutting down exploration, drives urgency without losing humanity, and holds a high quality bar while giving others room to lead. At the Developer Agents town hall, my peers nominated me for Growth Mindset and Transformational Leader, recognizing that balance of business needs with grace and compassion.
My biggest contribution wasn't a screen. It was the system around the work,the connective tissue that let a new team ship as one.
