scooblog by josh ledgard : collaboration

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.

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?

Overheard from the MVPS: More specific Feedback on Forums and Other channels

jledgard — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 21:07:15 GMT

This is the last of the notes i took at the Summit that I was able to actually write down.

On Forums…

“After posting an answer to a question there should be a link that goes directly back to a the filtered “unanswered” page you started from instead of just back to the forum. “

I think this is just a simple workflow tweak that could be provided in new forum UI.

“How do you know which answer is the best answer if there are multiple answers in a thread”

This goes back to a large debate over answer quality. Not all answers are equal. Lately I’ve liked what yahoo answers does here to show the rating directly with each reply about how good the answer was and then bubbling up the top answer next to the question. Check them out and let me know what you think.

“Be transparent about all moderation”

Yup, that’s on deck. We want the community to be able to police itself and call out users that may be abusing moderation rights.

On Other Channels…

“lots of teams used to do technical chats, but it doesn’t feel like they do anymore?”

This was something that team’s used to self organize and it appears that the investment here really has dropped in the last year. What do you think is a good schedule for product teams to do chats? What sort of topics would you like to see covered? No promises, but I can add some pressure to get more chats on the schedule.

And the related “The web chat control is really flaky”.

“We like webcasts best since they are the most well produced and includes slides, downloadable sample code, etc.

“pages on MSDN shouldn’t take 30 seconds to load when we hit F1 because you’re waitng for a tree view to load that we don’t need”

I talked to folks in MSDN about this and it was recently fixed. Library topics will render first and the tree control will render afterwards. J

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.

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.

Customer Support in Communities; From 0 to 761 in a Year

jledgard — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 09:55:18 GMT

Last week 761 developer customer questions were answered in our online communities by members of our customer support staff. These are the folks helping to bridge the knowledge transfer gap for .NET 2.0 and 3.0 that I talked about last week. The effort also represents a shift in our support strategy to start broadening the reach of every support dollar spent.

Rather than most of our money being spent on 1:1 private support we’d like to see every answer we give out help everyone in our community. The effort in the forums that the 761 answer number represents is just the tip of the iceberg of what’s possible for any group that believes in radical transparency.

One year ago today I wrote a slide deck shown to the VP of Support and Soma (my VP) that started with the question “How can Product Support and Development teams cooperate to make customers more successful through online communities?” The presentation went on to show two sides of our communities with the participation of our development teams.

In March of 2006 members of our development teams where working side by side with MVPs helping to answer customer questions. Customers seemed to like it, but we’d hit an answer percentage that couldn’t scale with the new found popularity of our sites… and development teams where soon going to start having to answer questions about an unreleased product named Orcas. Our support orgs needed to share the same goals as the product teams for “community health”. If a segment of your community is focused on support oriented culture then shouldn’t your support team be engaged in that community?

The case was made to fund support engagement in our communities to help “moderate, answer questions, triage bugs, and provide workarounds to customers in our communities”. In November of that year the first person funded from this presentation went live in our forums. It had taken the help of some allies in the support org and at least one other exec review to work out the details, but the idea of filling the knowledge gap became a reality. We’re on the path to hire almost 40 support engineers for this work by July and things seem to be going well according to this chart.

It shows the answer rates in our Asp.Net and MSDN forum communities. The reply rates are around 95%, but our goal with the answer rate is to get to 80% for the seven day rate and 60% for the on day rate. You can see some significant improvements since December. We've also seen more significant uplift in specific technologies where engineers where hired first. Since we haven't hit our goal yet I'll point out that the support engagement is only designed to get us so far.

A true victory is going to require several bullets that aren't the topic of this blog post. Additional bullets are going to be required because with a higher answer rate comes more popularity as more questions per month...

I'm really happy about this and some of the other programs I'll talk about in the next couple of weeks. Sometimes it's frustrating how long things can take at Microsoft, but I find slides like this make me feel better.

I wrote that in the October before Visual Studio 2005 launched! I left off my 5 year goals from this blog post since I have to leave some surprises. What I like about this slide that I keep tacked to my wall is that I'm very confident I'll hit my three year horizon in much less than 3. Although you may feel stuck in the mud when you are working on radical changes it can be uplifting to ones spirit to take the long view back just like you do looking forward to realize that progress is being made. Stay tuned.

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.

Great tips on ramping up online user communities

jledgard — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 19:20:44 GMT

There is truth in every recomendation from the following post.

Source: Creating Passionate Users: User Community and ROI

In Building a User Community Part 1 we talked about the importance of not only a strict "There Are No Dumb Questions" policy, but also an even more dedicated "There Are No Dumb Answers" message.
Today, this post will offer a few more tips on how to use your marketing budget (tiny as it may be) to build, support, and grow a user community from the beginning...

Forums are now as simple as a widget

jledgard — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 19:16:37 GMT

The interesting thing is that the same forum could be hosted in different widgets on different sites if I read the post correctly.

Freewebs continues to add to their widget catalog with their new forums widget. This customizable plug-in is available for use on your Freewebs page or on another website. Wherever the “widgetized” forum resides, the conversation is updated in real time. This continuous flow of conversation truly represents the capabilities of today’s widgets, and could be an ideal feature for groups of friends or small organizations.

Source: Freewebs Launches Forums Widget

Testing Community Based Open Source projects for corporations

jledgard — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 04:41:30 GMT

John's blog postings on testing open source projects where recently picked up by Mary Jo. Not bad PR for the work our team has been doing and good lessons to read if your team is looking at taking components open.

Our team has learned many lessons about the open source world since we released our first power toy to an open source site. Since that first release, we have had bug reports, feature requests, and code contributions. My suggestions below are based on our team’s experience. I hope you find my thoughts useful.

Source: John D'Addamio's blog : Recommendations for corporate teams developing Community Based Open Source projects

More Talk About Points and Reputation

jledgard — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 00:18:00 GMT

Brain, a PM on the forums.Microsoft.com site, discusses the element of adding game like systems into discussion forums.

While over at the www.asp.net site they've recently created a new point system. What do all the web dev guys think about their system?

Update: Here is the description of the Asp.Net site point system.... http://www.asp.net/resources/community-recognition/default.aspx?tabid=41