scooblog by josh ledgard : Idea of the Day

Random Tips on Interviewing for Microsoft

jledgard — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 02:28:10 GMT

A co-worker recently asked me to share some tips on interviewing people at Microsoft. I wrote a few up and figured I'd share them here as well. I love interviewing people and I get a lot of my style and tips from Gretchen since she’s done more interviews than I ever will. Anyway, here is my perspective on interviewing for Microsoft.

In the back of my head I’m always thinking “Could I work for this person” when I make my recommendations. This approach makes me tune some questions such that I’m honestly hoping to probe into areas where I feel the candidate could teach me something. If I feel like I learned something during the interview it’s always a good sign. It also helps when to think about this when looking for diversity of thought… what perspective or talents does this person bring to the team that we’re missing?
For Microsoft PMs I generally look for “well roundedness”. The vending machine series of questions I ask are designed to go after aptitude for interaction design, technical architecture, and testing. Since PMs are best when they can be a jack of all traits I don’t expect ideal candidates to excel at every competency, but I look for strengths in all three (dev/test/pm) since you’ll eventually be working with every discipline, writing code one day, and helping people test the next.
At least 50% of my questions have to be ones that I ask consistently. The rest of the space I reserve for customization based on the resume or role. It helps set a good bar.
I always like to start interviews (after chit-chat) with the standard “canned” questions for which most people expect such as something that’s really obvious from the resume. I think it puts people at ease for harder questions.

Anyway, feel free to share your tips. These were just the ones off the top of my head.

Merging Humans with Tools to Slow Down Trolls

jledgard — Tue, 15 May 2007 23:40:01 GMT

This was a great read that I found through Seth Godin's blog.

Troll whisperers aren't necessarily very good at hacking tools, so there's always an opportunity for geek synergy in helping them to automate their hand-crafted techniques, giving them a software force-multiplier for their good sense. For example, Teresa invented a technique called disemvowelling -- removing the vowels from some or all of a fiery message-board post. The advantage of this is that it leaves the words intact, but requires that you read them very slowly -- so slowly that it takes the sting out of them. And, as Teresa recently explained to me, disemvowelling part of a post lets the rest of the community know what kind of sentiment is and is not socially acceptable.
When Teresa started out disemvowelling, she removed the vowels from the offending messages by hand, a tedious and slow process. But shortly thereafter, Bryant Darrell wrote a Movable Type plugin to automate the process. This is a perfect example of human-geek synergy: hacking tools for civilian use based on the civilian's observed needs.

Curt Shilling - The Robert Scoble of Baseball?

jledgard — Thu, 10 May 2007 02:38:14 GMT

You know, the person that everyone listens to, makes outlandish statements that may offend people on occasion, and then has to issue statements like this...

Everyone has days and events in life they’d love to push the rewind button on, yesterday was one of those days. Regardless of my opinions, thoughts and beliefs on anything Barry Bonds it was absolutely irresponsible and wrong to say what I did. I don’t think it’s within anyone’s right to say the things I said yesterday and affect other peoples lives in that way.

Source: Public Apology « 38 Pitches

And I love the comments with reference to the rise of sports related bloggers tearing down the need for traditional media. This blog thing really is catching on I tell ya...

"You have successfully eliminated the need for the sportswriter with your blog, so I would suggest that you also choose to antiquate radio by taking your public comments directly to the people in the form of a “38 Pitches Podcast” and dominate yet another form of alternative media."

Tips on Motivating Your Team to Engage with Customers

jledgard — Tue, 01 May 2007 23:35:18 GMT

I was on a thread where a dev lead asked if anyone had tips to share on motivating his team to engage regularly with customers through blogs, forums, etc. Paul Yuknewicz shared a great set of tips that I'm republishing with his permission.

Get the team managers and leads to see the need for participation. I lean on them to keep bringing this up in team meetings, 1:1s, and other appropriate touch points. They should also model the best behavior. It really helps if you can get one or two managers hooked so they turn into your evangelists (MattGE is an example).
Appointed community people in each discipline: PM, Dev, QA, and UE. They can be the eyes and ears, and help move things along with their disciplines.
Talked about how looking in the forums is a fun and easy way to learn how customers are really using the product
Used metrics as carrots more so than sticks – e.g. emphasizing the people who made the strongest contributions and holding them up regularly in status mails, showing momentum in our trends, etc. I reward feature teams that collectively do the best work. I use the sticks more with the leads/managers so they know they need to do better.
Devoted 1-2 days to have a bash so the team can “get over the hump” of answering one question and marking one as answered. The team figured out how to navigate the site & tools, they created some lightweight processes, and they realized it’s not that bad. Some team members (e.g. Spotty) got hooked on the idea after this. I also got an idea of the points of friction and was able to start addressing those.
Follow up, follow up, follow up. If the team sees this is important in the body language of you, their leads, and the leadership team, they’ll follow suit.

To this list I would add

Get your GM, PUM, or VP to participate by blogging or answering customer questions. Brian Harry is a great example of leading by example in this respect.
Make sure people realize that you really aren't asking that much. If everyone in devdiv answered one customer question a week… well, there aren’t that many questions to answer from customers.
Make sure people are empoyered to talk about what they are working on and are rewarded for constructive transparency that helps educate customers. Nothings worse than trying to answer a question fo a customer when you can't tell them the real answer.

How do you motivate your teams to engage with thier customers? Is it important for you?

Does Amazon Ship the Best Social Software on the Web?

jledgard — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 21:28:11 GMT

Yes, Amazon has the best social software on the web. They've been quietly innovating for the last couple of years and it is unfortunate that people just think about their amazing catalog of user reviews and don't think of them as an innovation hub for social software.

The reason is because their social software just works is because it does so by focusing on the goal at hand... create a trusted brand for consumers to share information that leads to product purchases. There can't be much fighting about ROI there because the goal is clear... it's social software that's designed to help you buy stuff. It has a <gasp> purpose!

That crystal clear focus is something that's missing from most people's heads when they go about designing social software. No one asks "what's the purpose and how will this help drive value to our companies core deliverables?" If they do then they ask the question after they've designed and launched the features.

Just throwing up blogs, wiki's, forums, and reputation systems without asking "why" is probably better than choosing not to do so, but only be the slimmest of margins... because if you've got a great product... someone probably already put up those services for your customers whether you like it or not.

The following article got me thinking "what else has Amazon been working on and why is it the best social software no one talks about?

Source: Amazon Should Get More Props at Like It Matters

Amazon really deserves to be thought of as a top innovator in terms of developing a Web platform, socializing information, coordinating attention and providing relevance tools.

Lets reverse engineer their social software features and guess at the success metrics they've got in place. The latter task being something you'll find a challenge with most social software unless you get all hippie on me and say "it's all about just being there... man... it's about connections and stuff...dude".

1. User Reviews: This is the granddaddy of social features and is really their bread and butter. The goal was to give people more confidence in their purchasing decisions by allowing them to see what people who have the product say about it. It's information you just don't get when you're in a brick and mortar store and aside from the tax savings is probably one of the best reasons to shop online. The metrics used are probably the number of reviews, breadth of product coverage with reviews, and average review rating... the "was this review helpful" buttons.

2. Customer Images: The caption you can't see with this picture is "The Zune works really well in cold weather". Thankfully the moderators have a sense of humor. The real problem here was that the stock images can't nearly convey the feeling of seeing the product in person. They could never take enough pictures themselves of every product, so they outsourced that job to other customers. If customers were willing to write reviews why wouldn't they want to share their images of the product.

As silly as this image is it conveys the size of a the product in a way stock photos of iPods and Zunes don't do. The clear goal is to offer as many alternative views of the product as possible to customers. How soon before that "watch" link contains user submitted product demonstrations and review videos? I'll bet within the year.

3. Related Searches: Because there are no isles to browse in online stores outside of second life (hold that thought) you need to give people links to searches. What's interesting here that you can't see is that this is now both implicit and explicit. I can go lower in the page and suggest alternative searches for other users. I could suggest iPod as an alternate search. This, to me, demonstrates Amazon's interesting choice between being an explicit or implicit driven site. They know that neither is complete so they offer both for users.

The goals for this prime real estate are likely around providing links to customers that cause them to search more if they don't click purchase on the product they are viewing. Keep users on the site, searching around, until they find what they want. It would be cool to see a click-through map of these links and I bet there are metrics around it.

4. Wish List's, Registries, and Friends: Amazon has had these features forever. What's great is that it's a social feature represented online that replicates real world social traditions. Everyone already has their list for Santa, registries, and tell's friends about good deals. Their goal is to leverage the online world to make these activities people already do, seamless. They aren't trying to redefine the concept of wedding registries, they are simply trying to make gift registries better.

I would have goals around registries created, the number of registries created by customers that bought off of a registry for someone else (how sticky is it?), and the number of times users sent e-mails to friends and % of time those mails turned into paying customers.

The only thing they are missing is maintaining an explicate friends list that shares their history, lists, and purchasing decisions with me without him telling or my asking. But you can see how they are really close to this today. Update... they do have this, but it's on user profile pages..

5. The "Am I an Idiot?" Feature: I'm sure they have another name for this, but I like knowing that I might not be alone in my choice of purchase here by seeing what other people in my situation decided based on alternatives available. This is something else you can't do in person, but can do through the power of social networks online.

Sure, you have to adjust your definition of social networks, but that's what this is. I'm now in a network of people that viewed this page and ended up buying headphones. It didn't make the list, but the best part is that nothing is really hidden here and I didn't have to claim anything for them to present that information.

This is a networking feature that most other social networking sites haven't figured out how to integrate well. What data do you have that might validate a customers choice, their online reputation, or the real strength of their social network? I guarantee that if you think for a minute it's not just the explicate self described information that you can't validate about someone or can be swayed by troll voters online.

6. Social Search: I hadn't even noticed this, but Amazon is building the data to create a truly customer driven search result set. Today the goals are probably around just gathering information, but when they roll out true social search they'll be able to rate the results by looking at how often the social results lead to purchase versus the non-social results you get today.

7. Discussions: No social software is complete without discussions, but I think their solution would probably be better if they had a yahoo-like product driven QnA focus here. What's happening today, you can see from the titles, is that several users are confusing this with the review system. Good information is being captured, but I doubt they can get really good metrics off of this and they are diluting the value of the review rating system they have by giving people a way to opt out of it.

Out of all the features, this one feels like it did just get tacked on without a real goal. And if the goal was vibrant discussions... even bumping up to the MP3 players section will show you that they don't come near the vibrancy of non-amazon communities that talk about MP3 players. You should never have discussion just for the sake of it unless that's your explicate goal. :-) Not knowing what the discussions are being used for leads to poor design choices that don't serve the needs of your communities.

8. More Lists: Everyone can write their own "12 days of Christmas" song on Amazon. This absolutely makes shopping social through their virtual marketplace. Lists help drive search results, help customers find alternatives, and connect them to other users that they could ask questions of.

9. Guides: Why hire editors to write product guides? These people on the Internet are way more knowledgeable than any sales clerk you'll find in circuit city. Goal guides created, but here they probably push for the creation of highly rated, quality guides. Anyone could put a list together, but writing a great product guide takes lots of effort. If only they had some sort of...

10. Wiki: It's only a matter of time before product guides are wiki articles. It even contains an entry point that's hidden that's only a step or two removed from integrating a stumble-upon feature into the Amazon store. See the "random article" link? How soon before they have a way to replace bad product descriptions from Amazon's editors with a pure wiki?

Today I'd imagine that the wiki is in experimental mode and that they are simply offering the service to see what the usage looks like in order to determine more concrete goals. Is it to replace the need for paid for product descriptions? Is it to create FAQ lists about products? Is it to enable people to write great product guides? Today it is a little buried in the UI to have a real purpose, but this article already answers one of the first questions one might have when looking at a Zune that the product description doesn't directly tackle... why would you buy a Zune instead of an iPod? You can also find out why they offered a brown version in the wiki.

11. People Search: Find just about anyone and what sort of things they are into. I bet you have better luck finding a friend's amazon page than finding their blog. Not everyone has a blog, but just about everyone buys something online. I found my cousins, uncle, and dad. I can see their lists, and get a birthday reminder sent to me in advance of shipment dates requirements. The main goal here is probably to make it easy to figure out what to buy people, but it wouldn't take much to turn this into a lot more social experience with shared shopping, chats, and blogs.

12. Rich User Profiles & Reputation: No claims, just the facts about what I do and what people think about what I do.

Some things to notice about their profiling system.

a. The employ badges that cover both online metrics (top reviewers) and offline attendance of events. (See the community forum 04 badge) Badges are used as a nifty little reward for top user inputs.

b. It lets' me pivot by their tags, uploaded images, products they've highlighted, etc.

c. I can subscribe to a feed of their reviews, but oddly missing is the feed for their tags and wish list updates.

What do you think? I think it's a pretty impressive list of social software features that I imagine will only continue to get enhanced in the next couple of years with user submitted video reviews, product guide podcasts, and better connections between the main product page functionality and features like the Wiki & discussions that will get more defined.

Like I said, the most impressive feat is that they balance experimentation with features that are clearly designed to solve business problems with creative usage of social media. It's that tie between business goals and features that I find most impressive and leads me to say that they have the most impressive set of social software features in the web 2.0 world today. Prove me wrong. Show me another site with such clear ties between a business problem, customer need, and features that aren't just for the sake of features.

9 Challenges to Making Product Support Transparent

jledgard — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:27:00 GMT

Your customers have greatly evolved since the previous internet bubble, while most company’s customer support models have not grown with them. New, “Web 2.0” paradigms for content creation, publication, syndication, and consumption bring with them an enormous innovation opportunity for businesses needing to talk directly to millions of customers.

Because of this gap between customers’ needs and current offerings, up to 80% of your customer support budget is potentially being wasted. Currently, that money isn’t improving customer satisfaction, driving market share, creating buzz, generating great content, or (most importantly) helping customers be more successful. Most companies current support models no longer match the expectations and behaviors of your customers.

Today a huge percentage of our developer product support is delivered through traditional 1:1 phone connections. My goal is to flip the ratio to a 90% focus on “many to many” customer connections and further our support dollars to touch a larger customer base. It should become an exception when a solution given to a customer from Microsoft is a private conversation, and it should be the norm that solutions are published into our customer communities.

With this goal comes its share of challenges.

1. Culture Shock: Customer communities have been largely ignored in the past. They’ve developed their own culture of free assistance, codes of conduct, and rules that most support organizations have to adapt to. We’ve seen these growing pains first hand while introducing our support staff to our volunteer moderators. A classic example of this is a support org that wants to answer every question and customers that don’t want to do homework for students. The community is right. Your support budget shouldn’t do homework for anyone. J

2. Mixing Paid & Free: Classically the stance that’s been made is “Post in our communities and take your chances or call us and pay”. If you want nearly all of your product support handled in public it means handling paid support in public as well. Clearly there would be value in sharing all the knowledge gained from paid support questions with customers but it also would make it seem like we would be doing so to off-load our support burden to our customers in order to reduce call volume that’s costly. How do you rationalize paid work in a world that’s been volunteer driven? I’ll have follow-up posts on potential solutions.

3. Making Public Mistakes: There is a safety net in 1:1 support. If the answer given by a support technician happens to cause data loss over time then at least the damage is localized to one customer. If the same answer is given in public is has the potential to cause data loss for hundreds of customers and then you’ve got a big problem. Your support organization probably prides themselves in having high customer satisfaction and sorely want to avoid causing dissatisfaction through transparency.

4. Support Contracts can Make you Money: Not all support costs you money. What if you have a model for support that is either a value add for your product that sells more products or if you actually use product support AS your revenue stream?

5. Tools: Most community sites aren’t built around enabling both ad-hoc free for all assistance, discussion, AND paid support scenarios. If you look at the problems we’ve been having lately with our forums you know that these challenges aren’t insignificant.

6. Being Agile With Support: Your customers expectations change quickly so your support process needs to be flexible enough to handle it. Typically, in an outsourced support model you define a very strict process and set of rules so you can make it simple enough to save money and hand off to 3^rd party vendors. Today your customers may expect support in forums, but tomorrow they might expect you to chat with them in real time right when they have the problem. You have to have a way to adapt support process more quickly.

7. Who organizes this customer engagement: Is it really just a challenge for your support organization or should the people that make the product be accountable for the issues encountered with its use? That’s why there is no simple answer to Bill’s challenge. Viewing community engagement as purely a support or purely as customer marketing engagement is wrong. It’s every organizations opportunity.

8. Classic Support Metrics Don’t work and even new ones need tweaking: Measuring per incident customer satisfaction, time to resolution, and engineer utilization efficiency doesn’t work in public. You aren’t answering a question just for one person, there is a different quality versus quantity balance, and rigid metrics don’t generally allow for the agility that’s required with doing support in many to many environments with the help of customer experts. We’ve tried measuring community answer rates versus Microsoft answer rates and I think they are better than some other metrics I’ve seen the numbers have caused problems with users marking answers aggressively.

9. Your product has to be supportable and worth being supported: Don’t throw crap over the wall and expect people to help you sell it. It takes the right product, the right amount of customer interest in the product, and the right amount of knowledge transfer that starts to customers the day you start on the drawing board for your product.

I hope this starts to define the problem for people. Now I have to start answering these questions before 761 turns into 100,000.

What do you think? What challenges would you face if you had this goal? What should I be worried about?

A reason for social mapping

jledgard — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 20:28:28 GMT

Dare has one good point and one bad point about the new google mymaps feature that we've had for a while.

Source: Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Google MyMaps vs. Frappr: A Feature Isn't a Business

As usual the reactions from the blog pundits are equal parts surprising and unsurprising to me. The unsurprising bit is that I didn't find anyone who compared this to the collections feature of ~~MSN Virtual Earth~~ ~~Windows Live Local~~ ~~Live Search Maps~~ Live Maps which can be viewed at http://collections.live.com. I'm sure when the "Web 2.0" pundits eventually discover we have this feature it will be claimed we copied it from Google. :)

When are people going to stop giving google credit for everything? How long will the web honeymoon last? This is one area that we were not copycats... they were. Lets give credit where credit is due here.

On the other hand what I did find surprising were blog posts like Google Launches MyMaps - Platial Gets Screwed and My Maps at Google: Is Google Doing a Microsoft? from Pete Cashmore and Paul Kedrosky which complained that Google was killing "social mapping" startups like Platial and Frappr with this move. Ignoring that "social mapping" seems like a silly product category in the first place, I wonder what exactly is wrong with this move. Some startups point out consumer demand for certain features from online mapping sites (i.e. missing features) and the consumer mapping sites add the features.

I have one use for social mapping services, but it's going to require a feature that neither google or live maps support today. I want to make it easy for people to share road bike routes with one another. To do this you have to be able to define custom routes between markers and generate good printouts with the directions, pictures, and comments about the routes. It's not good enough to just map the best path between two stops since you really want more flexibility to say... not take the highway when you are on a road bike. Then people can collaborate to build some really cool bike routes based on revisions to other routes.

Forget Fancy new Powerpoint Templates

jledgard — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 08:32:50 GMT

I thought this was pretty cool.

MVP Learnings: User Groups, Web Sites, and Feedback

jledgard — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 03:21:24 GMT

User Groups

We do great at participating in our conferences, but we don’t focus on the breadth of developer user groups like we should. One of the better ideas was that we provide “presentation kits” to user groups. We create a topic and a talk with additional materials that could be distributed to a network of user group leads and then they could find people locally to give the talk after learning it. The biggest suggestion, however was how we get more MSFT people to talk at user groups. This led to me saying “you get 200 people in a room and I’ll send you Sara”. J

Web Site Envy

Having a separate site for Asp.net that’s really cool makes it look like we don’t care about other platforms or technologies because they have to use the uncool stuff. There are two components to this. 1^st is that the Asp.Net team has done a great job investing in content that draws people to the site. Other teams could do almost as well just be taking real ownership of their developer center on MSDN.

The second component is the site features. This is a gap that everyone is well aware of and we’re working on closing that gap and going beyond what’s on Asp.Net site. MSDN will become a 2-way street for content where real online community occurs.

The bonus would be that that ideally we can offer centralized services that allow anyone to easily create a focused short or long term site on a specific technology.

I’ll add that MSDN took a LOT of abuse at these sessions that ranged from broken links, to page load times, to the lack of updates, to the lack of functionality for a modern developer community.

What about that feedback?

There were two complaints here:

1. Customers may get an initial reply soon, but then they wait 9 months to see a resolution or a status of the bug changing. What’s happening for that 9 months? Is connect a black hole?

2. One MVP had submitted lots of bugs and had 80% of them fixed. Another had submitted a lot of bugs and didn’t have any of them replied to. ‘

Is the problem with the team that they filed the bugs against or with our communication? I think it’s both. Some teams do MUCH better than others at replying to customer bugs. We’ve tried to goal teams on this and create a consistent experience, but some team’s just haven’t drank the customer kool-aid just yet. I won’t tell you who just yet, but I may start posting our stats more frequently so you can see how we’re measuring teams.

Finally, and I’ve said it before, we need to do a better job of telling you what bugs we are fixing. We do fix a LOT of customer bugs, but it’s not even easy to do a query on those bugs. We should be telling you what gets fixed, when it was fixed, and in what release it’s been fixed.

What I learned at the MVP Summit: DPE, MSDN Links, and Attention

jledgard — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 00:53:58 GMT

I spent a lot of time at the MVP summit this past year. My team doesn’t have any MVPs, but our work is obviously valuable to customers. I’ll thank the C# team for graciously inviting us to spend some time talking with their MVPs. I took a whole lot of notes that have already started to influence my thinking, but I wanted to write everything down here with a note about what the comment meant to me. This is part one.

DPE Connection?

“Is there no connection between the DPE and product groups when it comes to connecting with customers? Couldn’t you do a better job syncing with the MSFT folks in the field and have them engage more?”

It’s true that our efforts have tended to focus on direct influence strategies that involve members of the team working on the products to connect directly with customers. I think we’ve largely ignored the indirect influencer we could have by leveraging the work of the field folks more. It comes down to low hanging fruit for me. The field guys do a good job working with customers while most product groups could stand to improve their customer relationships.

The connection to the filed will become more important however as we attempt to take our customer connection efforts international. The product groups, for example, can’t participate as much in non-English developer communities, but our subsidiaries can.

“International MSDN web pages are just broken”

Yup, there is shall we say, a “quality variance” when you go from one developer center to the next and also when you go from the English version to the INTL version. I believe that the problem is going to be addressed in two ways. The first is that MSDN is working on some platform changes that will help. The other is that we’re investing more in keeping the content up to date on developer centers so that someone is actually responsible for this. Beth, for example, started recently and is already having a good impact on the VB developer center and creating some great content.

Attention Focus

For efforts like Spec and Documentation reviews the feedback was that we could do a better job of keeping a steady stream of opportunities rather than backing dump trucks of specs up to customers and unloading them. This is an interesting problem because inviting customers into our product development cycle means that you see the same eb and flow of priorities that we do. When specs are ready specs are ready and the product teams end up focusing on that challenge.

The difference is that we’re paid to do it and it’s up to customers if they want to participate or not. I don’t have a great answer here. What I’d love to see is more specs developed in real time with customers on a private wiki because then you’d see the trickle of progress rather than the end results of 2 month pushes like you sometimes may have in the past.

Google makes your code prettier

jledgard — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 19:21:06 GMT

Something I'd love to see Microsoft do more of is small, simple, solutions to annoying problems that would delight customers. Here is a perfect example.

Google Gode Prettifier

A simple Javascript and CSS file, the Google Code Prettifier makes syntax highlighting in a web document super easy. It's pretty flexible too. According to the project page, the lexer involved will correctly highlight code written in C, Java, Python, Bash, SQL, HTML, XML, CSS, Javascript, and Makefiles.

Facilitate Knowledge Transfer in Online Communities

jledgard — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 21:44:00 GMT

I'm often asked how products teams can best participate in their online communities. It would be simple to say "go talk to customers" and be done with it, but you can have a more targeted approach than that.

They key to successful support communities is facilitating knowledge transfer between those with product expertise and a customer set who uses the product. Today the process of knowledge transfer from Microsoft to customers is slow because we create artificial barriers by not investing in, supporting, or measuring the success of community support channels.

This following model describes an example of an ideal flow of information throughout a product lifecycle where knowledge starts in the hands of the product groups, transitions to top customers and support representatives, and finally transfers to a much broader customer set until customers know more about the products we shipped than we do anymore. See the end of this post for an example of the initiatives and goals that could be applied over the lifecycle of a product.

*Although it looks like the product groups have to bear a large “support burden” early in the cycle, the actual volume of support requests into the online system is very low until the product is shipped.

**Volume trend based on web forum and newsgroup data for developer products.

There are several initiatives that can be driven in order to achieve the ideal knowledge transfer that’s demonstrated in the model, including:

Forum Question Answering

Providing great answers to questions that are asked early in the product cycle seeds QnA systems with content that can be reused by your community to provide the bulk of your answers after the product have shipped. Throughout the cycle you should focus your attention on the most difficult questions by giving customers a 24-48 hour window to answer before we get engaged the questions.

In Developer Division we’ve goaled that 80% all questions would receive a validated answer in fewer than 7 days. A healthy community will answer 60% of the questions in fewer than 2 days after the product has shipped. In order to achieve these goals, it will require engagement from product team members during the product development cycle in, funding a support team that assists in question answering while the community is scaling up, and a variety of other engagement strategies that are best described in their own post. There is no silver bullet for answering questions in support communities and you are going to have to do a little bit of everything.

Pilot programs with product support in Developer Division have shown that filling in that question gap above is very possible with relatively minimal effort.

Supplementing answers will not only mean you've generated more content, but we’ve seen that, with each increase in answer rate, there will also be a corresponding increase in readership and participation. This means that you will start pulling more people into the category of customers who show a significant satisfaction uplift when they are engaged in online communities.

Public Feedback & Workaround Publishing

Why wait for someone to call about a problem before you author a solution? Since the alpha of Visual Studio 2005, Developer Division has had a public bug database. We’ve kept it open since the release of VS 2005, and we continue to receive customer feedback. One of the hidden features of this bug database is that customers can submit workarounds to the problems which are reported.

Without any proactive effort to drive the creation of workarounds there were 732 customer created solutions in FY06 for the 12,176 bugs and suggestions that we did not address through a product release. To put that number in perspective our own publishing only covered around 200 KB articles in the same time. The community beat us by almost a factor of 4! To make up the difference today and publish the remaining workarounds it would cost us $120,619. You also get the added benefit of these solutions being published publicly as replies to the bug report. However, you should also encourage this behavior from customers by making it easier for them to publish and highlighting the most critical solutions until a real fix is released.

Training Needs Identification & Publication

Feedback and Forum systems excel at delivering reactive support, but you need to pro-actively identify the documentation and training needs of our products. Similar to performing a threat analysis as part of specifying a feature, a “training needs analysis” should also be conducted.

Each specification generated could identify at least one training opportunity ranked by an analysis of task difficulty and newness. Then training should be published for each release of the product that addresses the high priority training needs. A great example of complimentary content can be seen on the ASP.NET site.

Today these efforts are done on an ad-hoc basis by teams but are quickly becoming a best practice. It’s not uncommon for a team to spend a couple of hours producing a video that will be watched over 14 thousand times. You should seek to standardize a process that identifies these needs up-front, so this content can sim-ship with product releases. Time to start working on Oracs training materials. :-)

Transparency with Specifications and Product Plans

Product plans and specifications can be reviewed by product influencers such as our MVPs. Doing so means that these influencers will be able to start learning about the product before any code is written and they will also give you invaluable feedback that may head off issues before a workaround is needed.

Conclusion

In the end the slide I put up for product teams has three key messages:

Monitor community health for released and unreleased technologies
Be primary experts on new technologies & transfer our knowledge to influencers while focusing on escalations and difficult unanswered questions
Support released technologies by filling in CSS and MVP knowledge gaps and proactively providing training opportunities.

Post Appendix

Structured Knowledge Transfer Initiative Example Goals

Keep in mind that these are only suggestions and example goals. I also can't claim that we've hit 100% of these goals, but they are all very possible and have ben proven individually by teams in Developer Division.

1. During Planning

Review Product Plans & Specifications: During product planning MVPs and key partners must review and sign off on product plans & specifications. Respond to 100% of feedback within 7 days

2. In the CTP Phase

Training: Identify training needs by reviewing product level scenarios & feature specifications. All specifications contain a “Customer Readiness Estimate” that will help identify training opportunities.

Spec Sharing: Share 100% of specifications with all customers as features come online in public CTPs and respond to all the feedback within 7 days. You won't get as much as you think. :-)

Forums: Create public question and answer forums and engage product team members to ensure an 80% 7 day answer rate.

Feedback: Open a public bug & suggestion database where customers can post workarounds and vote & fix all fixable issues that generate 90% of the votes

3. Betas & RCs

Workaround Publishing: It’s likely now that bugs and suggestions are not fixable so goal that 100% of valid bugs and suggestions that aren’t fixed have workarounds.

Forums: Maintain an 80% 7 day answer rate and start engaging your product support team to deal with the ramp up knowledge gap in your customer communities. This gap is your enemy in the first two years and must be nipped early. :-)

Training: Product training published. Example: See the recent releases of the ASP.NET Ajax how to videos. 100% of the training published as screencasts on a Microsoft web presence.

4. RTM to RTM + 1 Year

Workaround Publishing: Continue to provide workarounds to customer feedback that’s not addressed in a service pack or other out of band release.

Forums: Enable escalations from peer to peer support to your experts (internal or external). Start measuring 2 day answer rate and goal at 60%. Share your goals with your customer community.

Training: Open training request database and enable customers to self publish training videos on the web site that others can watch. Drive training generation to address 90% of the top voted requests.

Workarounds: 100% of bugs and suggestions that aren’t fixed have workarounds.

5. RTM + 1 RTM + 5 Years

Forums: Product team members are now only engaged to handle escalations from support or key customers on released product questions. Product groups answer 100% of escalations in < 4 days.

Feedback: Support teams now provide 100% responses to and triage customer feedback to ensure repros before sending to PG teams for inclusion in service packs or V.Next products.

6. 5 Years to End of Life

Forums: Support teams now engaged only to handle only “paid for” escalations.

Feedback: Support and product groups only review the top 10% of voted feedback issues for possible hotfix releases.

Goals: Drive for increased customer contributions in all areas.

Viacom to YouTube: Zip It... Zip it good

jledgard — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 19:11:38 GMT

I think the clip says it all, but incase it doesn't...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Media conglomerate Viacom Inc. said on Tuesday that it was suing Google Inc. and its Internet video-sharing site YouTube for more than $1 billion over unauthorized use of its programming online.

Source: Viacom in $1 bln copyright suit vs Google, YouTube | Technology, Media & Telecom | Reuters

Having an open mind towards leaks

jledgard — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 20:38:47 GMT

Recently a blog post was made by a Microsoft employee who was excited about the new team he was joining. His post hinted at the new product by mentioning the potential competitors. Probably something that sholdn't have been done, but I don't really feel that it should be big news that we would be working in that space. It's sort of a "duh, Microsoft wants to do better online story".

There was a minor uproar on an internal Dl about how we should be educating folks about blogging. Here is my reply.

In this case the blog is not hosted on one of our blog sites. So there is no automated way to catch everyone who sets up their own blog service. There are a few solutions here.

1. New hire education. If we’re going to continue to have our blogging free-for-all it needs to be part of NEO. Back in my day they spent 30 minutes on “press relations”. I don’t know what we do now, but the press game has changed since then and it should probably include education on blogging.

2. Continuing Education. I hate to say this, but those cheesy videos that we produce on other issues like compliance… we need a series (shorter and with more unintentional humor) of videos about blogging at Microsoft. A tour around campus with in-person education couldn’t hurt. I think there is already an ongoing series like this in person that someone in evangelism is running.

3. DL Sign-up. As suggested new blogs on official employee blogging sites should force a DL membership for education and announcements.

4. Realization that leaks and transparency go hand in hand… and that’s OK. If transparency and customer connection is a strategy then some leaks are going to happen. There really is no way around it. The deal is that we have to be OK with the occasional leak like this. In this case it really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that we would be looking to improve our online services. It’s really not news. A bad leak would be more like a feature list, screenshots, or release schedule. Acknowledgement of the existence of a group working on an innovative service… not such a bad thing for the bottom line.

The last one is critical to our strategy to regain customer trust and loyalty IMO. I wrote a series of blog posts on it in 2004. Including one that talks about the problems of having a transparent culture. We have to be as diligent with education as we can, but be OK with the knowledge that asking people to talk to customers AND thinking that every secret will be held sacred is not a reality.

Vista use is habit forming

jledgard — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 21:26:51 GMT

Last night I sat down on my home PC and typed [windows-key] w-o-r [enter]. Nothing happened. This machine hadn't been updated to Vista and I hadn't realized that the way I launch applications has changed. It's a small thing, but I think the new start menu and application search beats the hell out of the never ending XP list of apps.