Finding the Teams Dashboard’s Voice

Cloudflare for Teams gives administrators a single dashboard to control network security: replacing VPNs with Zero Trust rules, configuring L7 firewall and DNS filtering policies, and isolating suspicious web browsing. With that much functionality concentrated in one interface, the product grows quickly—and the copy that guides users through it can easily drift out of sync. For Alice Bracchi, the technical and UX writer for Cloudflare for Teams, the fix was to define a formal product voice for the dashboard.

Why a Product Voice Matters

A consistent voice is what makes an interface feel familiar. Just as a friend’s voice is instantly recognizable on the phone, users notice when a product suddenly uses unexpected language, tone, or punctuation. A documented product voice standardizes those choices, from whether a greeting gets an exclamation mark to whether error messages use interjections. When design and copy align, the user experience feels smooth—users are never surprised by how the product communicates.

The Teams Dashboard lacked that consistency, largely because features had been built quickly and independently. The first step was to establish product principles that the whole team could agree on, then derive a voice from those principles, and finally draft writing guidelines for that voice.

Collaborative Brainstorming

Bracchi set up a series of brainstorming sessions with product managers, designers, engineers, and marketing. Each group worked independently on a virtual board, answering the same prompts intended to capture instinctive responses rather than carefully considered opinions.

  1. A “brain dump” of words associated with Teams.
  2. “Teams helps users by ______.”
  3. “In terms of experience, I’d love users to associate Teams with ____ (brand).”
  4. “Teams is unique because [it’s] ________.”

After sorting the hundreds of resulting sticky notes by lexical and conceptual association, clear themes emerged. From those themes, Bracchi drafted the product principles.

Six Product Principles

Each principle was labeled with an adjective that captures what the product should mean to its users.

  • Reassuring. As a security product, Teams protects. Contributors used metaphors like “bodyguard” and “armored truck” to describe it.
  • Transparent. Teams gives admins deep visibility into their traffic. Words like “observing,” “monitoring,” and “detect” surfaced. The product aims to be a “pane of glass” through which admins see whether something needs attention.
  • Easy to use. Security is inherently complex, but the interface must make it approachable. The goal is to be clean, accessible, and guiding, never assuming prior knowledge.
  • Trailblazing. Teams is new to the market but leading the way. The energy is modern, visionary, and fresh.
  • Frictionless. The product should “just work,” integrating with existing systems and staying invisible to end users, operating behind the scenes.
  • Adaptive. Teams should be resilient and ready to evolve, and should shape its development around user needs.

The Voice Descriptors

From the same sticky notes, Bracchi then extracted descriptors for how the product should communicate. Adjusting an approach from Torrey Podmajersky’s Strategic Writing for UX, she created a voice matrix that defines each trait across content, vocabulary, syntax, grammar, punctuation, and capitalization.

  • Straightforward. Give the right amount of information at the right time, with concise language.
  • Helpful. Offer guidance and tips; never leave users to figure things out alone.
  • Friendly. Be warm and welcoming, empathizing with users.
  • Fresh. Be informal and nerdy, like a friend fixing your computer.
  • Controlled. Stay calm. No panic, no overreaction, no exaggeration.

During this process, Bracchi found that “friendly” and “fresh” overlapped so heavily in practice that they were merged into a single guiding trait. The final voice rests on four principles: straightforward, helpful, friendly, and controlled.

Putting Principles to Work

The project gave the team a reason to step back from daily tasks and focus on the product’s purpose. Having principles written down has also changed how Bracchi approaches every line of copy—she now writes with the voice descriptors and the six product principles in mind, referring back to the original sticky notes board for inspiration.

What Comes Next

The current work is the high-level structure of a broader strategy. Over time, these principles will become full-fledged UX writing guidelines and patterns that enforce consistency across the Teams Dashboard. Users may start noticing copy changes as the new voice takes shape.