Project Stormbreaker
Testimonials and Text Only Due to NDA.
Team: Designers, Engineers, Military SMEs Focus: UX Architecture & Research, Leadership
Summary
I led design on Project Stormbreaker since its inception in 2022. Stormbreaker is an ambitious, congressionally funded tool that digitizes and connects the US military’s multi-year process for planning operations, allowing even detailed military plans and orders to be constructed, war-gamed, analyzed, and deployed in a matter of hours.
I began this project as a distant contributor: Smartronix (SMX) initially subcontracted creation of Stormbreaker to Microsoft, which subcontracted a portion of the UX work to me. This distance changed when the quality of my work was noticed by both SMX and Microsoft leadership. In three months I was promoted to design lead on Stormbreaker managing five senior designers and working with SMX’s program director on product strategy. After eight months, SMX offered me a role to lead design on Stormbreaker internally through launch and post-launch support.
Letters of Recommendation
My Contributions Included
Design Delivery on Stormbreaker
- 100+ base pages and their respective flows envisioned, researched, wireframed, iterated on, redlined, and supported post-launch.
- Design of highly custom pages – Map views for managing deployed forces, an org chart creator for determining command structure, a custom PowerPoint export, a simulation management system, a document editor, a classification system, an identity system, and much more.
A Custom Design System
- Core brand colors and typography integrated using design system tokens.
- An atomic component system with dozens of multi-state reusable components.
- Thorough annotations and redlines using Figma Dev Mode.
- Full WCAG 2.2 compliance.
- Rules for responsive adaptation at any screen size.
Leadership and Mentorship
Stormbreaker began with some uncertainty: Senior voices at SMX and Microsoft had difficulty finding shared understanding on big-picture questions like what this app would really do and how users would move around it.
In hopes of better understanding customer and user needs, I read the entire JP 5-0, a public 350 page technical document detailing how the military plans operations. I was able to understand it enough to discover what I suspected SMX wanted. I independently drafted a design in my “extra” time that hit the mark so well that the SMX program director requested my presence at most product meetings going forward.
Two months later, a Microsoft layoff affected our org and decisions were being made about letting the rest of my creative team go due to a perception that I was the only person meaningfully contributing. The Microsoft contact handling our team had been let go and nobody was sure what to do. I made the decision to step up and provide everyone with a path forward. I worked one on one with each team member to get them more involved on Stormbreaker, helping to develop and showcase their strengths. I was closely involved in every study run by our UX researcher and every component crafted by our visual designer.
In the 11th hour before everyone’s contracts were due to expire, I received amazing news: All my colleagues had begun to show results to Microsoft leadership and all of them would get to keep their jobs. I was formally promoted to Design Lead a few weeks later, continuing to lead my team from the Microsoft side for 5 months until myself and colleagues I recommended were offered roles at SMX.