{"id":6078,"date":"2018-10-11T06:00:37","date_gmt":"2018-10-11T13:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/garage-en-us\/?p=6078"},"modified":"2019-06-14T15:39:07","modified_gmt":"2019-06-14T22:39:07","slug":"microsoft-new-england-teams-up-with-customers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/garage\/blog\/2018\/10\/microsoft-new-england-teams-up-with-customers\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft New England teams up with customers to create high-impact product features"},"content":{"rendered":"

Microsoft Garage<\/a> has been a force in affecting positive change within the company, practicing new ways of thinking and spreading a growth mindset culture to employees as well as partners outside the company. Microsoft\u2019s global Hackathon is a key player in CEO Satya Nadella\u2019s<\/a> culture change priorities driving innovations that empower customers to achieve more. The Garage at NERD, located in Cambridge, MA is one of many Garage locations worldwide making big strides in challenging conventional ways while furthering business impact.<\/p>\n

\"Garage<\/p>\n

The Garage at NERD during the Hackathon 2018 Science Fair<\/h5>\n

The New England Research and Development Center (NERD) is steeped in a rich community of forward-thinking institutions that are molding some of the best minds of the future. One of the newer Garage locations, The Garage – NERD is in a unique position of having the perfect vantage point to measure the pulse of research giants like MIT right next door and invite these institutions and local Boston communities into the Garage space to collaborate and share learnings.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s about the people,\u201d said Linda Thackeray, Director of The Garage at NERD. \u201cWe\u2019re here to help employees and teams drive employee-led innovation at the company, for products and other areas employees are passionate about. We do that by creating opportunities to experiment and collaborate, not only within the Microsoft family, but with the local community as well. Look where we are! The greater Boston area is loaded with unique and robust talent and industry tech.\u201d<\/p>\n

The product development teams at NERD are at the forefront of the customer obsession initiative. The Docs Collaboration team took advantage of Microsoft\u2019s annual Hackathon to create a proof of concept that could change the way Office builds app features. Ben Wilde, principal program manager on the Docs team, led the hack project which focused on adding key features to Office apps to enable richer and smarter collaboration. \u201cA handful of us have been on a bit of a crusade to ensure that we\u2019re solving real, high-impact customer problems that we\u2019ve identified during actual conversations with our users, understanding what challenges they face when collaborating and coming up with creative solutions to eliminate their friction.\u201d Though the project was about Office collaboration features, their team\u2019s journey started months before Hackathon when the Docs team as a larger group began talking with customers in a more concentrated effort to get to the root of customer needs.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me personally the Hackathon has emboldened me and proved that the process works \u2013 I feel even more convinced now. This is something we\u2019re all passionate about and we truly believe this is how we should be driving features.\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wilde and team documented all their learnings and research, including customer conversations, and how they approached customer research as a process. A playbook of how to build features that solve actual customer problems, with data and feedback to validate what features should be prioritized. \u201cAt a high level, the process we went through started with building empathy and understanding user needs \u2013 the foundational sit-down-and-talk-to-customers approach. And more important than talking is listening, understanding where they feel friction, where things work and don\u2019t work,\u201d Wilde explained. From those conversations the team created feature concepts that they showed to customers and investigated which were the most impactful for collaboration. Those ideas became the key features that were prototyped during Hackathon and showcased at The Garage NERD Science Fair at the end of Hackathon, where their project won the Business Impact award.<\/p>\n

\"Hackathon<\/p>\n

Hackathon 2018 Science Fair, Business Impact award winners at Cambridge, MA: Terrell Cox (NERD Site GM), Lyndsy Stopa, Ben Wilde, Daniel Chattan, Anunaya Pandey, Garrigan Stafford, with David Ku, CVP<\/h5>\n

Lyndsy Stopa, a senior software engineer on the Docs team, was excited to talk about how the work they did began a larger conversation around what would need to happen to get these customer-backed features into product. \u201cThe more people that see this successful proof of concept the better. If you asked us, we\u2019d love to build these features into the product tomorrow. At the same time, we also know the limitations.\u201d While details of the features can\u2019t be revealed, the work they did exploring the existing codebase and hooking up other Microsoft technologies for a working prototype, in true hack fashion, allowed them to think about possible implementation paths.<\/p>\n

Anunaya Pandey, software engineer on the project, recalled the many discussions they had while showing their work to colleagues. \u201cThe fact that it was a hackathon meant that we could focus on what the experience for the customer was going to be like, versus how this was all to be implemented as part of a product. And that\u2019s generally the opposite of how we traditionally do things. We wanted to be able to show how this was going to look inside of an app.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHackathon for us is one step in a larger journey where we\u2019re trying to shift culture and get people on board with this approach to building features.\u201d Daniel Chattan, principal software engineer also on the Docs team, shared other takeaways. \u201cWe had an intern, Garrigan Stafford, who jumped in to work on the hack project. He was from a different product team, didn\u2019t know our code base at all \u2013 and he was able to make changes very quickly. It challenged a lot of our preconceptions that there was a big on-ramp to be able to do these things and for new people to get into this space.\u201d<\/p>\n

The project also used Microsoft cognitive services and machine learning to interpret and infer user intent while collaborating and suggest actions at opportune moments. More recently as a larger group, the Docs team has expanded to include more data scientists with a machine learning focus. Chattan explained how they got more out of cognitive services than functional impact. \u201cThis was a great way to demonstrate thinking differently about how you can pull these things like AI and ML into thinking about a feature. Rather than think, \u2018OK, we have this feature, now how do we fit cognitive services into it?\u2019 the approach that we presented is \u2018We have a feature we\u2019re building that\u2019s trying to accomplish something specific for the user, how can cognitive services help the user as opposed to helping the feature?\u2019 It leads to a more natural connection of those two things.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Project<\/p>\n

Garrigan Stafford, Anunaya Pandey, Ben Wilde, and Daniel Chattan in the Garage – NERD Maker space<\/h5>\n

It\u2019s about a different mindset, open to change, embracing experimentation, and validating with customers. All are values that the project team is championing within their immediate organization, and values that Garage continues to foster within the company.<\/p>\n

Post-hackathon, the team is also seeing a shift happening in their work group in how people are approaching feature development by being more incremental. \u201cLet\u2019s get to a minimum bar functionality,\u201d explained Chattan, \u201cthen iterate again, then iterate again, which allows us to move very quickly and see the results of what we\u2019re building and do fast course-corrections. We\u2019re building more incrementally to incorporate user learning into the process, so we can learn as we go instead of creating a big monolith that a user sees for the first time only after it\u2019s finished.\u201d<\/p>\n

It may sound like a simple idea, practicing this level of customer-obsession, but when trying to steer feature development there are other factors that come into play, such as demand for resources, and prior commitments that must be brought to completion before any new work can begin. The project team will continue their customer-validation approach for new iterations of the hack project, while relentlessly pursuing the same in their day jobs for current features they\u2019re working on.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me personally the Hackathon has emboldened me and proved that the process works \u2013 I feel even more convinced now. This is something we\u2019re all passionate about and we truly believe this is how we should be driving features.\u201d Wilde explained. This begs the question then – how does management feel about it? \u201cManagement is in spiritual agreement. Everyone we\u2019ve talked to is supportive and clearly sees the value of the features and the approach. But it\u2019s difficult to say right now if we can pull together the necessary resources.\u201d<\/p>\n

With time, the team remains optimistic that their features, and their processes, will be embraced more widely as they continue their journey. Just as Wilde and his team are on a mission to affect culture-change in product development within Office, The Garage pursues culture-change for the entire company, so individuals, groups and organizations can provide greater business impact using Garage programs. This week, The Garage at NERD opened its doors to HUBWeek<\/a>, a weeklong Boston festival where entrepreneurs, artists, and academics come together to collaborate on creating an inclusive and diverse future for art, science, and tech. Another example of the connective force of The Garage, and how a vibrant community continues to grow, full of doers, thinkers, and change-makers that will shape the next big ideas.<\/p>\n

Read more about The Garage – NERD<\/a>, check out a project shipped by Garage interns<\/a>, and learn more about internship opportunities<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Microsoft Garage has been a force in affecting positive change within the company, practicing new ways of thinking and spreading a growth mindset culture to employees as well as partners outside the company. Microsoft\u2019s global Hackathon is a key player in CEO Satya Nadella\u2019s culture change priorities driving innovations that empower customers to achieve more. The Garage at NERD, located….<\/span><\/p>\n

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