Niels Laute
Senior Product Manager at Microsoft
Venlo, Limburg, Netherlands
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNiels Laute is a Senior Product Manager and former software engineer with 9 years of experience shaping developer tools and Windows UX, now leading product direction for WinUI, PowerToys, and Windows Terminal at Microsoft. He blends a design-first mindset with deep front-end engineering skills (XAML/C#) to prototype, validate, and ship polished developer experiences used by millions of Windows users. His background includes modernizing the Windows Community Toolkit, contributing to the popular open-source PowerToys project, and building Huetro for Hue—a consumer app with over 500k downloads—demonstrating both product and platform impact. Niels is equally comfortable sketching high-fidelity prototypes and implementing reusable UI controls adopted across first-party and third-party apps. He brings hands-on accessibility and theming expertise (high-contrast, Fluent design) from WPF/UWP/WinUI work, and a history of driving developer onboarding through docs, samples and companion apps. Based in Venlo, Netherlands, he combines corporate product leadership with an active open-source contributor mindset and multiple Microsoft MVP recognitions.
9 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Higher General Secondary Education, Higher General Secondary Education at Blariacum CollegeB IT, IT & Media Design, Cum Laude, B IT, IT & Media Design, Cum Laude at Fontys University
Dutch, English, German
Github Skills (19)
icon-pack10
wordpress-themes10
xaml10
uwp10
user-interface10
ui-design10
interface-design10
uid10
ui-theme10
front-end-development10
dotnet-core10
wpf10
app-icon10
fluentd10
csharp10
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
microsoft/PowerToys
Mar 2020 - Jan 2023
Windows system utilities to maximize productivity
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:470 reviews, 285 commits, 296 PRs in 2 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Niels primarily contributed to the development of the user interface for the PowerToys settings, focusing on XAML-based implementations. Their work involved creating new settings pages and modifying existing ones, including the addition of new controls, updating styles, and improving overall UI/UX. This encompassed changes to various XAML files, ViewModel files, and related code-behind files within the project.
fancyzoneswindowspowerrenameproductivitymaximize
CommunityToolkit/MVVM-Samples
Jun 2022 - Jul 2022
Sample repo for MVVM package
Role in this project:UI Designer
UI DesignerContributions:3 reviews, 15 commits, 1 PR in 1 month
Contributions summary:Niels's contributions primarily revolve around updating the user interface of the sample applications. Their work includes modifying title bar elements, adding and updating various application icons, and adjusting XAML styling. The changes suggest a focus on improving the visual appearance and user experience of the UWP sample application within the repository.
dotnetmvvmkotlinc-sharpcsharp
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