Melissa Milloway, Senior Learning Experience Designer at Microsoft, has become one of the learning industry’s most recognizable voices by sharing practical ideas that help instructional designers create better learning experiences. But long before building an online following or becoming known for her expertise with tools like Articulate Storyline and Rise, she found herself drawn to a field that combined technology, creativity, and a passion for helping people learn.
Ahead of DevLearn 2026, we caught up with Melissa to talk about her path into learning and development, why she believes sharing your work makes the entire community stronger, what attendees can expect from the new Storyline & Rise Pro Lab, and the skills she believes every learning professional should be developing for the future.
Q: How did you get your start in learning and development?
A: I’m one of those people who is maybe a little bit more rare. I’m not an accidental instructional designer. I was in undergrad in mass communications, public relations, and I just really didn’t feel like it fit me well. I was in an online journalism class and I was doing a lot to help other students in the class code and teach them about those types of things. My professor pulled me aside and he said, “You know, there’s this program called the Instructional Technology Program. It’s A master’s program. And I think you would be really well suited to it.” He invited one of the professors from the program to come and speak with us about the field. And I was immediately hooked. I remember I went to every open house until I graduated from undergrad and I got into the master’s program. It combined all of my passions; getting to really understand how people learn. It’s the technology side of things, the design side of things. From there, I basically never looked back. It just suited all of my interests really well.
Q: What is your favorite part of the work you do today?
A: Problem solving is my favorite part of the work that I do. I love looking at our organization and looking at the data that we have and seeing where there could be a need for skilling. That’s something that I learned a lot about in my previous role at Amazon, they’re very, very data-driven. So that means sitting in monthly business reviews or our operational planning sessions and looking at data to see if learning can make an impact.
Q: What motivated you to start sharing your work publicly to your online network?
A: One of the things that I really admired in the web development space, and this was probably like early 2000s-ish, was that people were sharing their work in web design on Twitter, and I was getting a lot of inspiration from that.
I think there were some people sharing in the learning community, but maybe not as prevalent as the web design community. So, I was like, well, if I get inspiration from this, maybe I can inspire others and learn and grow myself by sharing my work. Because we’re in such a niche field, I think it’s so much more important to demystify those things. So that’s one of the reasons I wanted to share my work was to hopefully help other people, but also help myself learn and get feedback from people.
Q: How have your workflows changed over the last year?
A: People are probably sick of me talking about AI, but I’m going to bring up AI again. I would say a lot of the administrative work where I could spend my time really focused on my own unique skills and using those, I’m using AI to automate. I have AI schedule my meetings, help with repetitive tasks and things like consolidating user interview information. I’ve automated some of that where it doesn’t really require my skills necessarily, or my skills could be more automated. That’s where I’m using AI in my work.
Q: Can you give a sneak peek into the session you’ll be leading at DevLearn?
A: The discussion that I’m going to be leading is around Articulate Rise and Mighty. Mighty is a plugin that works with Articulate Rise where you can really supercharge it and customize it. I’m really excited to talk about things like scalability and how can we scale custom designs or designs that are more interactive and practice focused and things like that. Another piece I want to talk about is tracking and how we can track things beyond completion or even how people are answering test questions to really work backwards from the business problem we’re trying to solve. And how do we do that within our own tools. Mighty is one tool that can help us to do that. So, I’m really excited about the scalability and like the data aspect of things and talking about those
Q: What is something you hope attendees take away from the Storyline and Rise Pro Lab?
A: One thing I want them to take away is to demystify that something like practice or creating solutions are really more design-oriented and not maybe as plain, something that really brings people in, doesn’t have to be super complex. And there’s ways to really look at the problem that you’re trying to solve and work backwards from that to scale those types of things.
Q: What’s a feature of Storyline or Rise that is overlooked?
A: One feature that people overlook in Storyline or Rise is that you can create consistent design, not everything has to be bespoke or super creative. There’s a time and a place for everything. So something such as just like having one theme color and having that be the focus and applying that through a whole project really can help create a consistent design. And then there can be other things that you add in to add visual interest that don’t detract from the learning experience.
Q: What’s one skill every learning professional should develop over the next year?
A: Something that I’m speaking a lot with people about is systems thinking. It’s not a skill that’s necessarily easy to develop, but that’s looking across like your whole organization, programs, teams, things like that. How do things work together? And the same with technology. How do different tools and workflows work together? I think a good example of this is when we look at tools in AI, like Copilot. We have tools in Copilot Studio where we can build agents, we can build workflows, all of those things interconnect and work together that can help us to deliver learning experiences. So, it’s really about understanding how those systems impact each other and work together so that we can create future learning products that we’re really focused on.
You can learn directly from Melissa during the Storyline & Rise Pro Lab at DevLearn 2026, where she’ll share practical techniques for creating more engaging, scalable learning experiences and using data to measure what really matters. If you’re looking to take your Storyline and Rise skills to the next level, this is a session you won’t want to miss.
Q: What’s one prediction you’re willing to make about where learning is headed?
A: I would say that my prediction would be about going back to our roots and really focusing more on how people learn and what makes a good learning experience that builds people’s skills. And less about the order taking and things being engaging and more just back to the roots of what learning was previously. So really focused on that and getting results.
