Why Connect?
Several people have asked questions, both here on my blog, and in other venues such as newsgroups and emails to myself and other members of the Microsoft Connect team. Many of the questions center around the basic themes of:
- Why Connect?
- Didn't we already have this with Betaplace, Product Feedback Center, and other sites?
- Why are you reinventing the wheel/what does Connect offer that we couldn't get elsewhere?
All of which are very good questions, and revolve around some of the basic purposes of the Microsoft Connect site. Microsoft is making a number of changes in the way that we relate to our customers and trying to enable more direct, transparent relationships with our customers. However, when you have literally millions of customers, it becomes extremely difficult to manage a process for getting meaningful feedback that works for both the customer and Microsoft. If you have hundreds of thousands of suggestions, bug reports and feature requests, just managing the data itself is a technical challenge, and using it becomes a daunting task in and of itself. Now let's add the complexity of getting some sort of response back to the customers who filed those requests or bug reports.
Actually, some of this comes down to a very basic question, and one that I've been asking, in one form or another, since I started working with the Connect team.
That question is, "What is feedback?" On the face of it, that's a very simple- almost disingenously so- question. But when you start to scratch the surface of it, it becomes a much deeper one. I've found that if you ask that question of three different people, you'll get three different answers. None of those answers are necessarily wrong, but reflect the needs or desires of the person you're asking. A developer will usually say bug reports constitute feedback. A program or project manager will mention things such as suggestions and feature requests. It's interesting to me to come to grips with the complexities of developing and managing a system that enables people to get feedback from the customers and respond to it.
And that's the important part, in my estimation. Feedback, in order to be useful, must be two-way. A person using a product that finds a bug might report it and never hear anything again, simply because it's one of 10 thousand bug reports filed against the same product. That's not feedback. The very definition of the term "feedback" implies that the loop must be closed, that there is some sort of response that lets the person who submitted that bug report that yes, it was receieved and acted upon- even if it's not a personal response, they should at least be made aware of the fact that they're not expending energy by throwing bug reports into a bit bucket.
So, coming back to the original point about reinventing wheels- the reason I started talking about the closed loop of feedback is because that loop must be closed from *both* sides. It's not just about providing tools for Microsoft customers to communicate with Microsoft, but also for the people at Microsoft to be able to effectively manage and respond to that communication. Microsoft has had several great sites for receiving and responding to customer feedback, including Product Feedback Center (Ladybug), Betaplace, and others. Each of these brought some great features to both the "external" and "internal" customer. Each of these systems had their flaws as well- some were difficult for internal customers to use, others required a significant expenditure of time and/or effort to integrate with the product team's processes, and so on.
The point of Connect is not to reinvent any wheels, but rather to synthesize the best things we've found in the various beta and feedback sites Microsoft has had in the past, while trying to eliminate some of the problems that have been barriers to adoption, both internally and externally. In order for that feedback loop to be closed properly, the toolset has to work as well for the people at Microsoft as it does for our customers, or it simply breaks down in an avalanche of data that is impossible to manage.
For the next version of Connect, we're working on a lot of great improvements for our customers. We're also working on a number of enhancements to the systems the product teams use to interact with their customers via the Connect site. Many of these improvements won't be visible to our customers, except in the sense that communication will improve as it becomes more simple for the product teams to effectively communicate. It's actually a unique and very interesting challenge to have two sets of customers- the product teams within Microsoft, and the customers that use the products or services created by those teams. Microsoft Connect is the system that brings customers together with the people that want to hear from them. It's a challenge we take very seriously.
The Connect team's motto and vision is "Collaborate with every customer", meaning that if Microsoft Connect works perfectly, it should be possible for Microsoft product teams to get feedback from every single one of our customers that wants to provide it and respond to that feedback in a manner that is meaningful. We have a long way to go to reach that goal, but I and the rest of the Connect team take that goal very seriously.
The Connect team is tasked with (as an example) making it possible for a team of 20 developers to effectively communicate with ten thousand customers quickly and efficiently to garner their feedback, bug reports, suggestions, feature requests, and so on. As you can probably imagine, it's not simple to create a system that does that. However, we've got a lot of great tools that already exist to build on and take functionality from. So we're not really reinventing the wheel, we're trying to take the things that have worked in the past, make them work better, and eliminate the issues that have prevented some of these systems from working as well as they could.
