Microsoft is a big organization, to put it mildly, but there are opportunities to work across disciplines and teams. Seizing these can be valuable and fun.

When I was on the Modern Work Customer Co-Innovation team, one of the first products we built was an Outlook add-in that worked within users’ calendars. I noticed that there were several instances where our group collectively used a variety of terms to describe the same thing, causing confusion.

For example, our add-in functioned within a side panel that pops out from the right on click. This was variously called a:

• panel
• pane
• flyout
• container
• drawer
• sheet
• slide-out
• overlay

There were numerous other functions within Outlook for which we had the same problem: too many terms to describe the same thing.

It occurred to me that the Outlook team must have names for these functions and components; surely they couldn’t be calling them a dozen different things. So I reached out to the Outlook team and was connected with a content designer. I explained what we were building and asked if they had specific terms for the various tools we were interacting with.

Of course, the answer was “of course.” I took screenshots of all the tools and functions, wrote short descriptions of each, and sent the doc to the Outlook content designer. He filled in the official Outlook term for each item and then we met to quickly review the doc. I then met with my team to roll out the Outlook terms to them, and voíla! Everyone was on the same page. From then on, everyone used the correct term in meetings, saving time and preventing frustration. And, I now had a connection with the Outlook content designer so I could easily reach out with future questions and run our team’s designs by him. Win-win!

See how this collaboration fit into my overall content design process on this team.