From Me Apps to a We App When Microsoft set out to build a new tool for its Office 365 suite -- one that has become a hallmark of the COVID-19 remote work environment -- the team took an unusual approach: the development process would mirror the product being developed. Before joining MSCI in mid-2018, I was head of engineering for Microsoft Teams, a new collaboration product for Office 365. When we began working in early 2015 on what would become Teams, we knew we needed to approach the project in an entirely new way-a way that reflected our goals for the new tool. Over the years, Microsoft had developed and improved upon personal productivity software for the workplace, from the earliest versions of Microsoft Word and Excel in the 1980s to our email software in the 1990s to the Office 365 suite of hosted tools introduced in 2011. With Teams, however, w we aimed to create a " we app, " not a " me app " . a It would be a tool engineered to support group collaboration in a world in which teamwork is increasingly at the center ce of everything -- though we never quit quite imagined the central role Teams woul would play in a world necessitated by the of remote work necessit coronavirus pandemic. 21