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When Microsoft set out to transform the way it launches its products, there was a lot on the line.
The company rolls out hundreds of new product offerings a year, representing billions in projected revenue. Each division of Microsoft had developed its own approach to releases and built up disconnected and inefficient processes. While the launch managers would sometimes cross paths, they didn’t share metrics or have many opportunities to discuss best practices. Often, they had to complete repetitive, manual tasks to move the process along or provide timely status updates. The few governance procedures in place were either low-value, “check the box” activities or over-engineered processes that slowed time to market.
With this as the backdrop, a small group of people from Microsoft Business Operations in the Microsoft Digital organization decided to make a change. They hoped to weave all the existing launch procedures into one centralized application that would showcase the latest cloud technology and Microsoft 365 functionality.
The challenge was massive, even audacious. To tackle it, the team would need help. Where would they turn?
They turned to some of the brightest, most innovative, forward-thinking employees the company has. They would kick-start the solution at an upcoming Microsoft Hackathon with a global team of citizen developers: front-line employees, customers, and community volunteers working together to address their business problems with user-friendly technology.
Getting from idea to “Ship it”
Megan Gustafson Melloy, a Business Operations program manager, and her team, were searching for a way to optimize the launch process for the 150 employees who ran product launches across the company.
While discussing the challenge with coworker Eric Nelson, also a program manager in Business Operations, the team imagined that a new, dedicated app might help to quickly standardize launch processes and metrics. It could increase everyone’s efficiency while improving the overall release experience for Microsoft teams, partners, and customers. Although they had no software engineering experience, the small team was empowered by their leadership and tools to build a basic interface to test their ideas. “We all dove in and learned Microsoft Power Apps,” Melloy says. “That’s the nucleus of how it started.”
Fred Jordan, the general manager of Planning and Launch, supported the team’s creative direction. In 2018, Jordan had written a vision document about meeting the needs of the company’s decentralized product planning, policy, and engineering teams to adopt a standard launch process that ensures quality and compliance. Digitization of the process was a core aspect of the vision.
In just two days, the team worked together to create a Power Apps prototype that provided a surprising level of functionality. Nelson focused on the user interface. “My role was to think about graphics and the design of things,” he says. “Up until that point, I hadn’t done that very often in my job.”
Within months, the app would become a widely used internal tool named MILA, the Microsoft Intelligent Launch Assistant. Now available for Microsoft employees through a web browser or the mobile app, MILA is a dynamic launch assistant that lets release managers quickly define the scope of a launch, document change requests, track issues and risks, and share status information. It pulls together data from various sources, compiles key action items, and displays them with a Power Apps front end.
But it would take many hours of coordinated effort before the product would be ready to share with everyone inside Microsoft. Without dedicated development resources, could the team create a viable app that people would use?
The missing link: Citizen developers
The project was clearly aligned with Microsoft Digital’s vision of a digital, predictable, and compliant launch process, Melloy says. Though no engineering resources were available, Melloy soon became the center for a growing group of volunteers who wanted to use the Power Platform to improve their own day-to-day work experiences. “My motivation sparked when I was walking out of a meeting and I wanted to do my status explanation,” she says. “I didn’t want to go back to my office, open my computer, and type it in. I wanted to be able to type it in my phone as I was leaving for the day, walking out the door, going to do the things that I need to do.”
Nelson enjoys learning about new Microsoft technologies and collaborating with others. He had participated in the annual Microsoft Hackathon several times and thought the upcoming summer 2019 event would be a good next step for the project. “This was probably my fourth or fifth hack,” Nelson says. “It’s an amazing opportunity to participate with other people where there’s all this ideation going on. Annually, I’m always looking for opportunities to jump in and contribute the skills that I have.”
Melloy agreed that the Hackathon could boost the visibility of their project and help it succeed. “I started asking everyone on our platform if they would like to participate,” she says. “I would ask them about their pains and show them what we were thinking about doing. The Hackathon team formed because people were asking for more. We knew we couldn’t do it all ourselves.”
Before long, more than 60 volunteers had signed up to work on the project. Melloy decided to kick off the event with a shared PowerPoint deck. “Everybody got one slide,” she says. “We saw some really big ideas, but we didn’t have a ton of detail until we got started.”
Melloy also set up a Microsoft Teams site to connect Hackathon participants in Redmond, Dublin, and India. “We did everything in Teams,” she says. “It was great to see the daily activity in chat. We learned a lot from each other.”
Ian Boswell, Melloy’s former manager, was eager to see what the team could do and loves how successful they have been.
“We had one criterion: Does the new launch process have a positive business impact,” he says. “We encouraged people to take a swing at this and it was so rewarding to see the energy that it freed up in them.”
Creating the ideal launch experience
The Hackathon resulted in a well-received mobile app. “As much as this app was useful, it was also a proof of concept,” Nelson says. “That’s when we really started converting it into a desktop app.”
The team iterated the software based on feedback from a growing set of active users. After more than 250 updates to the software in 40 days, the browser-based version of MILA was successfully launched on October 15, 2019. “It was an amazing time,” Melloy says, “I realized this wasn’t just tinkering anymore. It was actually going to be something big.”
Over 70 percent of launches worldwide have already used MILA. There are now more than 60 services available in the tool, using data from Microsoft Dynamics, SharePoint, user input, and more. MILA users can learn new skills, share learnings, search online, or even view news from within the app.
Nelson and Melloy trained many others on the app and created a style guide to support new citizen developers who want to get involved. This professional growth turned into a new job for Nelson as a senior operations program manager, and Boswell became the strategy lead for the Power Platform Customer Success Team.
The team surprised themselves with what they were able to accomplish. “What the engineering team had ready enabled us to create this beautifully operating thing,” Nelson says. “Every day, we just kept asking, ‘What can one simple next step look like?’”
