Tracking Design Decisions with Copilot

COMPANY

Microsoft

ROLE

Product Designer

TIMELINE

May 2025 - 2026

Team

Azure Database

CoPilot x Teams

OVERVIEW

How can designers track the “Why” behind design decisions?

As a team of 2 designers and 1 researcher we set out to identify a streamlined way to leverage AI tools to automate the manual process of tracking progress and context.

Determined the Microsoft-specific design workflow

Mapped how designers work across Teams, DevOps, and Figma to understand where decisions happen and where context breaks down.

Identifed the gap in the tooling ecosystem

Uncovered that existing tools capture outputs, but fail to track evolving requirements and the rationale behind decisions.

Leveraged existing AI capabilities

Explored how Copilot can integrate into Teams to automatically capture conversations and generate actionable work items.

PROBLEM

Product designers work in fast-moving, cross-functional environments where...

Requirements constantly evolve. However, there’s no reliable way to track what changed, why it changed, and who made the decision.

Information is scattered across meetings, chats, sticky notes, and personal docs, making it hard to revisit or share context—despite being supported by multiple tools within the Microsoft ecosystem.

SOLUTION

Align: A Copilot powered app that turns conversations into action...

It is an AI-powered Teams app that captures decisions as they happen and automatically turns them into structured, actionable work.

.....Tracking projects, Syncing work & capturing decisions anywhere

Powered by Copilot, Align scans through all your chats, teams and projects to suggest potential work items capturing the rationale it and for what and who assigned it.

Here's what Align does-

Smooth Onboarding

Create projects from conversations
Add work items to these projects
Call Align anywhere

Your Workspace Analyzed

Align goes through your chats, teams and meetings to find existing project teams and suggest new projects.

Put everything togther — Project pages

Track progress at the top, manage suggested work items and project updates below, and invite collaborators anytime.

Sync Work items to Azure DevOps

The Project Board shows all your project’s work items. Open any card to view details and sync it with Azure DevOps after granting access.

Collaboration simplified: Call Align anywhere

You can now use Align across meetings, chats, and the app, so you can stay informed, collaborate better, and create work items on the go.

@Align in your chats

Create projects from conversations
Add work items to these projects
Call Align anywhere

Search for context

Chat with Copilot on the home page to manage work and catch updates.

RESUME