Beyond her work at Microsoft Teams, Chen takes on a small number of independent engagements each year, partnering with founders, design leaders, and teams shipping into AI, consumer, and enterprise software.
Each engagement is shaped to the team and the moment: a few hours of consultation, a focused sprint, an embedded design partner across a launch, or a longer-term advisory relationship. Outcomes range from product strategy and AI interaction models to brand systems and community programs.
If something below resonates, reach out. The best fit is usually a short conversation about what you’re building and where design is the leverage.
Working alongside founders and PM/design leadership to sharpen product vision, define the smallest sharp wedge, and translate it into a roadmap teams can ship against. Drawing on experience taking 0→1 products from prototype to launch at consumer and enterprise scale.
Embedded for focused sprints on a critical surface, or a recurring review cadence for in-flight work. Critique grounded in real-time communication, AI workflows, and complex multi-role systems.
1:1 sessions for product designers preparing portfolios, interview loops, or thinking through their next chapter. Honest, structured feedback informed by hiring and reviewing across 50+ designer orgs.
Helping teams move from “we should add AI” to concrete interaction patterns that hold up at scale. Covers prompt design, conversational surfaces, real-time inference UX, and the trust and safety layers around them, informed by shipping AI Interpreter and Copilot patterns inside Microsoft Teams.
Hands-on workshops for design and product teams getting fluent with AI as a material: rapid prototyping with LLMs, building internal AI tools, and frameworks for evaluating AI-powered experiences with real users.
End-to-end brand systems for founders shaping a new category: naming direction, mark, type, color, motion, and the voice that ties them together. Recent work includes SurfDry and The Network, each shipped as a complete identity package ready for product and go-to-market.
Turning the messy reality of a product into a story people can repeat: positioning frameworks, narrative arcs, landing pages, decks, and launch assets. Built for clarity at the moments that matter, demos, fundraising, App Store, press.
Building a point of view that compounds: content pillars, channel mix, cadence, and the production system to keep it running. Grounded in growing a 28,900+ TikTok community and producing videos that generated 11M+, 3.8M+, and 2M+ views.
Designing creator-led launches end to end: brief, casting, deliverables, and measurement. Past collaborations include Netflix campaigns for Stranger Things and Bridgerton, and a feature in The New York Times covering the rise of office-creator content.
Templates, motion treatments, and short-form video systems built for the scroll: vertical-native composition, on-platform typography, and remix-ready formats that keep the brand intact wherever it lands.
Designing and operating community programs end to end: format, cadence, partnerships, and the rituals that make a community feel like one. Built on a decade of organizing, from leading Design Co with Don Norman’s Design Lab to producing public talks and salons across SF and NYC.
Talks and workshops on AI in product design, designing for live communication, and how small teams ship 0→1. Available for design organizations, conferences, and internal team summits.
Pro-bono mentorship for early-career and historically underrepresented designers, and lightweight advisory for student-run design organizations building their first cohort of industry partners.
For services and collaboration inquiries: alisonchen.co@gmail.com · LinkedIn
