With over 30 years of experience, he has led multidisciplinary design teams to create and ship products across platforms, devices, and customer touchpoints. His work spans verticals including education, productivity, home and family, communications, entertainment, financial services, and developer experiences. He has helped shape AI-powered features and agentive tools, and has led brand-forward design across high-visibility surfaces including Microsoft’s developer-oriented web properties, a range of scrappy start-ups, and, most recently, Atlassian.com. His work is rooted in high craft and the power of storytelling through design.

Nathan is a curious, kind, and empathetic leader who lives the servant-leader, learn-it-all ethos. He focuses on helping teams and partners have real impact, and he develops and grows capable, curious makers who execute with craft and clarity. He builds, fosters, and challenges culture through conversation and inclusion.

Nathan currently serves as the Vice President of Design for Atlassian’s Teamwork Platform.

His teams are responsible for the Teamwork Graph, which powers AI-driven connections between people, content, and activity across Atlassian’s products; Data Experiences, including Atlassian Analytics and the company’s data visualization platform; the Growth Platform, which includes www.atlassian.com and the company’s growth/marketing messaging and notification system; and for the internal People Tooling experiences across hiring, onboarding, and performance reviews. Until recently, he also led the Automation team and the initial phases of Atlassian Studio, the company’s toolset for creating agents and intelligent workflows.

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 (.NET, TypeScript, et al.), Azure Developer Experiences (Azure App Service, Azure Functions, Azure Container Apps, et al.), Azure DevOps, Microsoft’s One Engineering System, and MakeCode. He also led creative direction for Microsoft’s developer-focused web properties, including developer.microsoft.com and dotnet.microsoft.com, ensuring consistency across product, brand, and marketing surfaces, as well as the Developer Division’s Design Foundations (spanning brand, content, motion, audio, illustration, design systems & engineering) and Design Operations (producers, communications, culture, et al.). During this time, he also worked on the early integration of GitHub Copilot and helped shape Microsoft’s agentive AI approach to developer tooling.

Before that, Nathan served as Vice President of User Experience for Promethean, a global leader in interactive flat panel displays for education. He led multidisciplinary teams across product, visual, motion, audio, content, research, and industrial design, helping reshape the company’s digital experience and creative direction.

Prior to that, he was the Director of Design for Likewise, a start-up founded and imagined by Bill Gates’ private office. He led both product design and brand and marketing design, building a cross-functional team focused on social and machine learning-based content recommendations across TV and 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 Exchange and Cortana, Microsoft’s earliest foray into AI. There, he led a cross-company v-team focused on building trust in the relationship between users and the assistant.

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.

In his spare time, he is the owner of Good Works Dept., a company focused on small-batch goods, storytelling, and purpose-driven design.

Get in touch

nathaniel.auer@gmail.com

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Awards & Honors