Microsoft Contracts
1 million contracts, one modern platform
Microsoft’s platform for managing over 1 million contracts had become outdated and hard to navigate, forcing teams to spend significant manual effort just to find what they needed. I redesigned the entire experience end to end and introduced an AI agent to make finding and managing contracts fast and intuitive, now serving 30,000 visitors a month.
- Role
- Lead Product Designer
- Years
- 2026
- Scope
- Strategy, UI/UX Design, Research
Challenge
Microsoft Contracts was outdated and hard to use, yet legal teams relied on it daily to manage over 1 million non-revenue contracts. With no dedicated researchers, I had to learn complex legal workflows before redesigning it, understanding how teams actually worked before changing anything. The challenge was to modernize a deeply embedded, high-stakes system without disrupting its users.
Impact
0 Million+
Contracts Managed
0+
Monthly Visitors
0% Faster
Task Completion
0+ Hours
Estimated Annual Savings
Collaboration
As lead product designer, I collaborated directly with business stakeholders, PMs, and engineers from vision through execution, keeping design aligned with business goals and technical feasibility at every step. I also owned the research myself, ensuring the redesign was grounded in real user workflows rather than assumptions.
Designing for an Existing Userbase
Microsoft Contracts manages every non-revenue contract at Microsoft, and two groups do that work. Paralegals handle most of the daily tasks, while attorneys manage teams of paralegals, and the platform is designed around each of their workflows.
User Type 1
Paralegals
Paralegals carry the daily volume, drafting agreements, chasing renewals, and pulling terms for whoever asks. Their work is fast, repetitive, and mostly about finding the right contract quickly.
User Type 2
Supervising Attorneys
The attorneys managing those paralegals rarely open a contract themselves. They need the state of the whole book, what’s due, what’s stuck, where the risk sits, and how the work is spread across their team.
User Type 1
Paralegals
Paralegals carry the daily volume, drafting agreements, chasing renewals, and pulling terms for whoever asks. Their work is fast, repetitive, and mostly about finding the right contract quickly.
User Type 2
Supervising Attorneys
The attorneys managing those paralegals rarely open a contract themselves. They need the state of the whole book, what’s due, what’s stuck, where the risk sits, and how the work is spread across their team.
Talking to Users and Stakeholders
I interviewed users to understand where the previous platform failed them, and met with business stakeholders to collect all necessary requirements. I took both perspectives into account with every design decision as I pushed the project forward.
Questions for Users / Business
“Can you walk me through how this platform is used today?”
“What is the current platform missing that you need most?”
“What specifically would you want an AI experience to help you with?”
“What current functionality would you not want us to disrupt?”
“If we could only fix one area of the platform, what would it be?”
“Where is time being lost across the current platform?”
“Where does the existing platform slow you down the most?”
User Pain Points
From several interviews with paralegals and attorneys
Business Requirements
From planning meetings with CELA business stakeholders
Auditing the Existing Experience
After the business stakeholder conversations and user interviews, I audited the existing experience, documenting where it failed users and what legacy experiences needed to be carried forward.
Mapping the New Experience
I mapped every feature of the new experience from three inputs, user pain points, business stakeholder requirements, and the old platform itself. The PM and I used this map to align on strategy and direction before design began.
Sketches & Wireframes
I started with rough sketches to explore different structures, then progressed my preferred directions into low-fidelity wireframes. Along the way I reviewed the work with business stakeholders, validating direction while changes were easy and quick to make. By the time I moved into high-fidelity design, the direction and structure were already agreed on.
Initial Sketches
Dashboard Wireframe
Key Design Decisions Based on Research
These are some of the key decisions I made on the new dashboard experience, directly informed by talking to users, as well as the business requirements and the audit of the existing legacy platform.
AI Entry Point
First and most prominent element on the dashboard
Encourages users to engage with it right away
Legacy Experience Entry Points
All critical legacy experiences still have entry points
Clear but not overly emphasized
Statistical Overview
Quick big-picture overview of their contracts
Ability to change view and see team members' workload
Important Contracts
Surface relevant contracts right on the dashboard
Metadata overview, AI summary, and the ability to view
Before
After
Key Features
Key Features
Dashboard
A summary of everything you own, status, spend, and upcoming renewals, with the contracts that need attention below. This is the view the old platform never had.
AI Contracts Agent
Ask a question in plain language and the agent finds, compares, or summarizes contracts, citing the ones it used. It replaces most of the manual searching that used to fill the day.
New Contract
New contracts start from a legal-approved template. The AI fills in details from a one-line description, and a pre-check flags issues before the draft is created.
Upload Contract
Brings existing contracts into the platform. The AI extracts parties, values, and dates from the document, and the user reviews what it found before adding it.
Emphasis on AI Experiences
The agent was the single most important goal for the business and the biggest addition for users, so it got more time and detail work than anything else on the platform. Most of that went into the output itself, how answers read, what they cite, and how they hold up when a paralegal acts on them. Done right, it saves hours of manual work.
Custom Components for the Contracts Agent
I designed five custom adaptive cards specifically for the Contracts agent, each built around a recurring moment in the contracts workflow that users encounter.
Building the Design System
I put together a design system for Contracts that sits within Microsoft's global Fluent 2 system. It prevents visual drift, keeps the platform easy for other designers to pickup and maintain, and makes handoff simpler.
AI Making an Impact
This is the technical workflow behind the project. AI helped collapse the gap between design and code. I moved from Figma designs to a working demo fast enough to get business sign-off on the real thing, then handed the frontend UI straight to engineering.
Colleague Feedback
Feedback from leaders and partners I worked with on the project, shared during performance reviews.
Charles stepped in without hesitation and delivered. He brought a fresh and thoughtful perspective on every request, proposed multiple well-considered design options, and turned things around at an incredible pace.
Senior Product Manager
Microsoft
A standout strength of Charles is his ability to deeply understand and balance both PM and SWE needs. His collaborative mindset, responsiveness, and design leadership made a significant difference.
Principal SWE Manager
Microsoft
