Studio Alpha — Azure Mission Planner

Overview

Studio Alpha was created as a new “serious games” organization within Microsoft, bringing together Azure’s world-class AI and cloud infrastructure with the immersive, interactive expertise of Xbox. The vision was to build an integrated, extensible platform for mission-critical simulation — empowering government, defense, and commercial customers to rapidly plan, test, and iterate solutions to complex challenges inside secure virtual environments.

Process

As Principal UX Design Director, I led the design vision and strategy for the Azure Mission Planner platform. My responsibilities included conducting research with subject matter experts, UX wireframing, prototyping simulation interfaces, and guiding design consistency across a multi-disciplinary team of designers, engineers, and PMs.

I collaborated closely with motion designers to create 3D concepts and immersive storyboards, ensuring clarity under pressure while maintaining accessibility and inclusivity. To support scalability, I also worked across design teams to align on a cohesive design system, ensuring that mission workflows were intuitive, adaptive, and technically feasible.

Impact

The work positioned Studio Alpha as one of the only organizations capable of uniting gaming, cloud, and AI into mission simulation. The Azure Mission Planner narrative and prototypes helped Microsoft demonstrate how Teams, Azure, and AI agents could transform defense and industrial decision-making. The design direction provided stakeholders with a tangible vision for the future, providing insight, accelerated engineering roadmaps, and showcased Microsoft’s unique ability to deliver integrated modeling and simulation at scale.