Teams for SMBs
Clothing brands, floral studios, tech consultancies, landscapers, and caterers all offer various channels of communication for customers to reach them. From Instagram, to Email, TikTok, Facebook and WhatsApp, managing and collaborating on incoming inquiries becomes tough.
ROLE
Product Design Intern
PROJECT TYPE
New Feature
PLATFORM
Desktop
DURATION
June to Aug 2022
TEAM
PM, Design Mentor, Research
OUTCOME
Co-created a foundation & vision for SMBs in Teams
Overview
While Teams is widely recognized as a robust platform for internal collaboration, its potential for external engagement—an area of high priority for SMBs—tends to either be underutilized or non-existent in Teams. As a team of 4 designers, we each took the lead on various projects within the SMB ‘Acquisition to Payment’ pipeline (pictured below). I focused on problems within the Outreach -> Intake loop.
Low adoption due to unclear & missing value prop
While Teams is widely recognized as a robust platform for internal collaboration, its potential for external engagement—an area of high priority for SMBs—tends to either be underutilized or non-existent in Teams. As a team of 4 designers, we each took the lead on various projects within the SMB ‘Acquisition to Payment’ pipeline (pictured below). I focused on problems within the Outreach -> Intake loop.
Learnings
Start small - having permission to design with minimal constraints presented a rare opportunity within a well established platform. It also presented many challenges. Originally, this project not only encompassed communicating with potential customers but also collecting business insights on them. Attempting to satisfy both of these at once became a daunting task and prevented me from iterating on more granular components. Next time, I would identify a clear problem statement and scope from the start.
This project is under NDA. Please reach out to me if you'd like to learn more!
©Sara Li. 2025