Restartable Town Halls and XL meeting support
Features on the Teams client calling stack, built for events where failure is very public.
- Role
- Feature owner — design and implementation
- Organisation
- Microsoft
- meeting scale
- XL
The problem
Town Hall events are the highest-stakes surface in Teams: a company all-hands or public broadcast with thousands of attendees watching. Before this work, an event that ended incorrectly could not simply be restarted.
XL meetings push the client calling stack well past the assumptions baked into normal meeting code paths.
What I did
Designed and implemented the ability to restart Town Hall events, along with XL meeting functionality, on the client calling stack that supports Microsoft Teams infrastructure.
Worked across a large cross-platform codebase spanning C++ and TypeScript, refactoring and hardening existing paths rather than bolting features on the side.
Built components with test-driven development inside an agile delivery cycle so regressions in a high-blast-radius area are caught before release.
Outcome
Organisers can recover a Town Hall event instead of losing it — removing a category of incident that was previously unrecoverable from the user's side.
XL meeting scenarios are supported as a first-class path in the calling stack.
Improved usability and user experience of core Teams calling features.