Office Live Workspace
Wow! Its been a while since I wrote on this blog but I have been really busy working on some really fun stuff that I wanted to share with you!
As you already know, Office Live Workspace Beta was launched this year and its been crazy, hectic and quite a rush to release a product that I have helped build from the start! Yes, we are still in Beta but I just wanted to share my "insights" along this process so far:
1) Really know your core customer: Easy, right? Well, its easy to think you know the customer but to really understand who your core customer is hard. Identifying your core customer really helps with identifying the balance of features, the UX for the features and what features make sense for them. A good way to think about this is say, you build a cool pen that writes under water. Now, if you thought your customer was anyone who used a pen, you would be right but only partly so. So, if a feature request came up to say, add a light source at the end of the pen, it sounds like a good feature request to take right? So you agree to spend about 30 hours of work on it. Now, if your core customers are identified as divers, not just anyone who swims but just divers, would you still do that feature? Do divers need a light on the pen if they already wear a mask that would provide the light? Now, the feature doesnt seem P0* anymore, does it? (*MS-speak for the highest priority going from high to low i.e. P0-P4). Fine, I just pulled that example out my head but you get the idea!
As the team sat around brainstorming and prioritizing our features, some features would stand out as just a "great idea" or "isnt that cool?" but with the help of a product planning and marketing team, we closed in on our customer. However, we had to constantly remind ourselves that this wasn't just for one customer but a class of core customers and we needed to build something that would truly close a gap and make them giddy with joy at this product!. So, who is our core customer?
Office Live Workspace is for anyone who uses Microsoft Office for work (professionals), for school (students) and for home with a simple value prop - the ability to upload, share your Office document and access it anywhere.
Ah! Clarity - Knowing the customer helped define exactly which features we would build on (E.g. Activity notifications) and which ones we would wait to hear more customer feedback.
2) Interact with your customers,especially the early adopters: We have community forums (http://officeliveworkspacecommunity.com) and those are just abuzz with customers providing us with direct access to their opinions. With our first public beta, we have had a flurry of feedback and activity and we have taken that feedback and are already heads down making existing functionality better, building new features and fixing customer reported problems. Our solid support team is engaged with our customers and you probably see a few team postings (including mine) whenever we get a chance to. Having a public beta has helped create a connection with customers who want to play with cutting edge products and this connection makes us look smarter as we now look at our product through the eyes of the customer. We know we need to do a better job engaging even more here but I just wanted to say "Thank you" to our early adopters for taking the time to read this blog as well as participating in our online forums.
3) Time goes quickly so plan well: Planning is critical to any product launch, especially an online service. When we started months ago, we had churned out a bunch of ideas but going from the idea, to scenarios, to designs, scoping to a single design, coding, testing, dogfooding, incorporating initial feedback, propping to servers and then going live (whew!) takes time. You do have some freedom in that its an online service and not a packaged product but really, time is limited so planning in advance helps a ton in ensuring that UX makes sense and is a solid design. When I look back at last year, I cannot believe how far we have come and how far we still want to go...
4) Allow time for "synergy" in your teams: We all know that any team goes 3 stages - forming, storming and then performing. Pretty self-evident but what it means is that trying to rush the, what I call "synergistic" group, will just result in failure. Allow for and then account for teams to create their dynamics so that what you get in the end is not a hotch-potch but a truly cohesive product built by a team that performs well together. Office Live Workspace team was formed by folks from all around Microsoft and outside Microsoft and its been truly a pleasure to work with some of the best minds here. However, we still needed time to get to know each other's strengths and skills so that we could make the best use of what each of us brought to the table. One exercise that was really useful is our Insights training we had last year where each of us filled our questionaires and ended up with a booklet that described what motivated us, what our communication styles were, what our preferred way is to learn ...extremely interesting and also helped us understand each other better.
5) Iterate on design again and again....and again: If you don't, it will be too easy to stagnate on designs and not innovate on something that really not just meets but exceeds customer needs. Even for the most basic features, we went through a bunch of iterations on each of our features before we even shipped it and you can bet, we will continue to do so as we continue to identify issues with the design ( E.g. we are working on improving our current Office integration story). Our design process has also evolved and we now have an agile set of UX designers, usability engineers, product planners, program managers and developers in the same room hashing over designs and bringing their perspective to the design before a single piece of code is written. Very cool!
6) Stretch the comfort zone and be willing to build cool features: Lets face it - any product needs to stand out in some way to help create customers who are "promoters". A promoter is the equivalent of your friend urging you to try something coz its so cool! Its the factor that makes you reach out for the red Zune past the other "ordinary" colors. We focused on building the basics for our initial release but we just added activity notifications and are planning a lot more - just watch this space if you see the cool features we have planned for the future.
That's it for now but I will be sure to add more insights and ideas as we continue to move through our cycles going forward. A month ago, I got back in touch with an undergrad friend of mine and was pleasantly surprised that she had read my blog even though we hadnt been in touch for 8 years!! Now that I know that I have at least one reader, I promise to be more diligent going forward :)
Kavitha
