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Bio

Nathan Auer is a passionate design leader with a long history of building inclusive and collaborative teams that impact products and people through design excellence and customer focus.

Her currently serves as 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.), MakeCode, as well as the Developer Division’s design foundations and design operations.

Nathan Auer is a passionate design leader with a long history of building inclusive and collaborative teams that impact products and people through design excellence and customer focus.

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With nearly 30 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 inclusion.

Nathan currently serves as the Vice President and Head of Design, Teamwork Platform at Atlassian.

Previous to his current role, he served as the Head of Design for Microsoft’s Developer Division, leading a team of some 70 designers responsible for the Visual Studio family of products (Visual Studio, VS Code, GitHub Copilot in VS, et al), Azure Notebooks, languages (.NETTypeScriptet al.), Azure Developer Experiences (Azure App ServiceAzure FunctionsAzure Container Appset al.), Azure DevOps, Microsoft’s One Engineering System, 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.).

Before which, 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 NotebooksLearning Tools Immersive Readeret 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 is adjunct faculty with the University of Washington’s Division of Design at the UW School of Art, where he spent a decade serving as a liaison from Microsoft in support of Microsoft’s Design Expo program, mentoring hundreds of students along the way. He also served as a mentor to 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

Or find me on the socials:

 

 

Awards & Honors

 

2003—2018, Microsoft

Co-author of multiple patents dealing with pen & touch interfaces, interacting with AI agents, communications, calendaring, location services, and business rules (details here and here).

2011, Microsoft

User Experience Leadership Program

2009, Microsoft

Unified Communication Leadership Development

2008, Microsoft

Unified Communication High Potential Mentoring Ring

2007, Microsoft

Puget Sound Society for Technical Communication: Exchange 2007 Outlook Web Access

2007, Microsoft

Microsoft Exchange Server "Customer Love" Award: Accessibility, Exchange 2007 Outlook Web Access Light

1995, Western Washington University

The Kennedy Center/American College Theater Festival: Poster Design, God’s Country by Steven Dietz

 

 

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