Episode Details

Your Teams notifications are dumb. Yeah, I said it. They spam reminders nobody reads, and they look like they were designed in 2003. Here’s the fix: we’re going to walk through three parts — structuring data in Microsoft Lists, designing an Adaptive Card, and wiring it together with Power Automate. Subscribe to the newsletter at m365 dot show if you want the full step‑by‑step checklist. Once you connect those pieces, the boring alerts turn into slick, clickable mini‑apps in Teams. By the end, you’ll build a simple task card — approve or snooze — without users ever leaving chat. Sounds good, but first let’s look at why the default Teams notifications are so useless in the first place.Why Teams Notifications FailEver notice how quick we are to hit “mark as read” on a Teams alert without even glancing at it? Happens all the time. The dirty truth is that most notifications aren’t worth the click — they aren’t asking you to actually *do* anything. They just pile up, little blocks of static text that technically “alert” you, but don’t invite action. Teams was supposed to make collaboration easier, yet those alerts work more like an old-school overhead PA system: loud, one-way, and usually ignored. Here’s the play-by-play. Somebody sets up a flow — say, an approval request or a reminder to check a task. Teams sends out the ping. But that ping is empty. It’s just words in a box with zero interactivity. The recipient shrugs, clears it, and forgets about it. Meanwhile, that request sits untouched, waiting like an abandoned ticket in the queue. Multiply that by dozens of alerts a week, and congratulations — you’ve built digital background noise on par with standing between a jackhammer and a jet engine. The fallout shows up fast. A manager needs an approval, but the request is sitting in limbo, so they end up chasing the person in chat: “Hey, did you see that?” That message promptly gets buried under noise about lunch-and-learns, upcoming surveys, or the outage notice no one can action anyway. Before long, muscle memory takes over: swipe, snooze, dismiss. The result isn’t that Teams is broken; the problem is that the notifications running through it were never meant for interaction. Think of the current system like a fax machine in 2024. Yes, the paper comes out the other side, and technically the information transferred. But nobody brags about using it. Same with Teams alerts: technically functional, but painfully outdated. The real “work” still spills into other channels — endless email trails, chat chasers, and manual spreadsheets. Teams becomes a hallway covered in digital flyers that everyone walks past. From what we’ve seen across real deployments and support cases, notifications that aren’t actionable get ignored. In practice, when users get hammered with these static “FYI” pings, response rates drop hard — we keep seeing the same pattern across tenants: the more hollow the alerts, the less anyone bothers to act on them. And with that, productivity craters. Missed approvals, overdue tasks, broken handoffs — it all snowballs into “sorry, I didn’t see that” excuses, and the cycle repeats. Time is where it really hurts. Every useless ping spawns follow-up emails, escalations, manual tracking, and a dozen extra steps that never needed to exist. Teams channels fill with bot posts nobody reads, and actual high-priority alerts sink unseen. The fastest way to torpedo user engagement with your processes is to keep flooding people with alerts that don’t let them resolve anything in place. One client story hammered this home. They had a Purchase Order approval process wired into Teams, but the messages were generic blurbs with a bland “view request” link. Clicking took you to a site with no context, no instructions, just a blank box waiting for input. One approval ended up sitting untouched for three weeks, holding up procurement until the vendor finally walked away. The lesson was obvious: context and action have to be built into the notifi