Giving teams who no longer share a room the speed of a physical Post-it® note, and 3M its first paid product inside Microsoft Teams

why it mattered

Interviews with our target users showed that people needed space to work individually and think alone before sharing with the team, even during collaborative sessions. Tools built for constant visibility left that individual step with nowhere to go.

For 3M it also meant specialty software: a new type of product for a company whose products had always been physical.

the challenges

1. Supporting teams collaborating while keeping an individual aspect in the experience.

2. Helping users synthesise large amounts of information during brainstorming, where a board fills up faster than anyone can read it.

3. Carrying the physical note into the digital one, so the habit people already had survived the move to a screen.

the approach

Post-it® for Microsoft Teams launched in autumn 2022 as a subscription collaboration tool, both as an integrated web app and a mobile app. Its simple interface let users create and share boards with their team, creating notes, grouping them and changing size, colour and font to organise ideas visually.

Voting helped teams pick which ideas to focus on and move discussions forward, search let people find the notes they needed, and AI features like smart sorting and grouping by topic made organising information easier. Later we added webcam capture, turning physical notes into digital ones, and Zen mode, which gave people a private space to brainstorm without the pressure of others looking.