Selected engineering work · Live products
Shipping in a live product used by millions
End-to-end feature delivery in a production app: accessibility as a gate, versioned CI/CD instead of click-ops, integrations into tools the rest of the company already used.
This case study represents work previously performed by a member of our engineering team before the formation of our consulting firm. It was delivered at Microsoft, on a consumer productivity application. Certain product and implementation details have been omitted for confidentiality.
Context
A live product does not care that the feature looked good in staging. It has users on the other side of the keyboard, some of them using a screen reader, a release process that is either a pipeline or a ritual, and two or three other tools the rest of the company already lives in.
This work was end-to-end delivery inside that reality: a major new view in the web app of a widely used productivity product, accessibility as a ship constraint, a desktop background presence, integrations into adjacent products, and moving the team off click-ops releases.
The challenge
The web client needed a Grid View as a first-class way to work with tasks, including accessible keyboard interactions, not a hidden power-user table.
The desktop client had no always-on background presence, so the product disappeared when the window closed, and dormant users had no reason to come back.
Releases were still configured by clicking through workflow UIs. Security and compliance checks were a recurring manual tax. The web client’s UI framework was due a pass for security issues and first-load cost. The desktop client needed to connect to other products in the same suite, and partner teams needed a path they could follow.
The complexity
- Ship in the live app, not a parallel demo. Design, implementation, tests, rollout: one owner on the Grid View.
- Accessibility is a gate, not a polish pass. Keyboard and voice navigation have to work or the feature does not ship. Regressions at this scale are public.
- A release you cannot replay is not a release process. UI-configured pipelines do not version, do not review cleanly, and do not encode compliance.
- Integrations are part of the product. If the rest of the company works in another tool, the product has to meet them there.
Our approach
- One feature, held all the way through. Grid View on the web client: design, implementation, testing, rollout, and keyboard interaction, not a handoff after the happy path.
- Fix accessibility as production defects. Critical issues, including voice-navigation failures, closed as product work, then held.
- Put the product in the tray, then speak to people who left. A system-tray application on Windows for always-on background execution, plus re-engagement notifications for dormant users.
- Make the pipeline the source of truth. Move build and release from UI-configured workflows to YAML CI/CD; put security and compliance requirements in the pipeline so they stop being a meeting.
- Integrate, then write it down for the next team. Cross-product features on the desktop client, with implementation guidance so partner teams were not reverse-engineering the first integration.
The solution
- Grid View live in the web product used by millions of monthly active users, with accessible keyboard interactions.
- Windows background presence and a re-engagement notification channel.
- Accessibility quality held for three consecutive months with no high-severity accessibility regressions.
- Versioned CI/CD in place of click-ops releases.
- Cross-product integrations on the Windows client, with guidance reused by partner teams.
Outcome
The view shipped. The resume’s honest product measure is a contribution to a three-point NPS improvement, not a claim that one feature moved NPS on its own. Releases stopped depending on someone remembering the clicking order. Dormant users could be reached without standing up a separate marketing stack. The accessibility bar held.
Technology
TypeScript · JavaScript · React · Windows (UWP) · YAML CI/CD · accessibility (keyboard, voice navigation) · product integrations
Why this is here
This is prior individual work, not a client of this firm, and we do not sell “we will build you a to-do app.”
Live product work means a defined slice, shipped in production, including the unfashionable constraints, and a pipeline the team can rerun.
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