With over 25 years of experience, Nathan has led multidisciplinary teams to experiment and ship products across varied platforms and devices, for verticals spanning education, productivity, home and family, communications, entertainment, financial services, and – most recently – developers. He is a curious, kind, and empathetic leader who lives the servant-leader, learn-it-all ethos. He is passionate about helping his teams and partners to be impactful in their roles and develops and grows teams of capable and curious makers and executers. He builds teams through collaboration with his partners and directs, fostering and challenging culture through conversation and allyship.

Nathan currently serves as the Head of Design for Microsoft’s Developer Division, which includes the Visual Studio family of products, Azure Notebooks, languages (.NET, TypeScript, et al.), Azure Developer Experiences (Azure App Service, Azure Functions, Azure Container Apps, et al.), Microsoft’s One Engineering System, Azure DevOps, MakeCode, as well as the Developer Division’s Design Foundations (brand, content, motion, audio, illustration, design systems & engineering, et al.) and Design Operations (producers, communications, culture, et al.).

Previous to his current role, Nathan served as Vice President of User Experience for Promethean, a company focused on transforming the way the world learns and collaborates through its digital products and as the dominate makers of interactive flat panel displays in the world-wide education market.

Prior to that experience, he was the Director of Design for Likewise, a start-up founded and imagined by Bill Gates’ private office that is focused on social and machine learning recommendations of content, including TV & movies, books, podcasts, and restaurants.

Nathan spent 15 years at Microsoft, including as Design Director for Microsoft Whiteboard’s “vision” pillar and for design collaborations with Surface Hub 2 and early work on the Surface Duo, as well as for Microsoft’s Education products. For Microsoft’s education work, he built and led the multidisciplinary design team responsible for a number of different efforts across the company (Teams for Education, OneNote Class Notebooks, Learning Tools Immersive Reader, et al.). During this time with Microsoft he also led teams for Office, Xbox, and Outlook, and served in senior roles for Cortana and Exchange.

While the bulk of his career has been focused on design, his earlier years were spent moving from sales to web development to product management, which has led to a well-rounded understanding and close partnerships across the varied functions.

Nathan spent a decade serving as a liaison between Microsoft and the University of Washington’s Division of Design at the UW School of Art, in support of Microsoft’s Design Expo program, mentoring hundreds of students along the way. He currently mentors students in the University of Washington’s Human Centered Design & Engineering graduate degree program, and with the non-profit Green Dot Public Schools in support of its mission to create strong post-high school opportunities for all students.

Get in touch

nathaniel.auer@gmail.com

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