The Teams Dashboard: The Design Story

In July 2019, Bethany Sonefeld's team at Cloudflare began conceptualizing a product that would eventually become Cloudflare for Teams. The goal was to bring protection to anyone and everyone by extending the same security technology offered in their app. After months of brainstorming sessions, design iterations, and testing, they had an MVP version of Teams: offering customers a way to protect their network from security threats on the web using DNS filtering. In 2018, Access had been helping customers secure their applications using a zero-trust security model. Bringing this functionality into Teams felt like a natural fit — Access would act as a bouncer standing in front of the door, checking identity, while Gateway would be a bodyguard, keeping your team safe as you navigate the Internet. During Zero Trust week, they introduced three new capabilities into Teams: L7 inspection of traffic for threats that hide below the surface, launched the Teams WARP client, and expanded their Zero Trust offering to support SaaS applications. As the product grew, so did Bethany's design team. By November 2020, she had hired three designers to partner with her on crafting the rest of the Teams story. Looking ahead, strategic thinking will help the entire team aim for a common goal, increase efficiency, and lay the foundation for a scalable product that grows over time.