How a Radical Approach to User Research Unlocked New Growth for Microsoft Yammer

Sounds good. Thanks for the question. Let me take a few seconds and think about how my frame this well. OK, so, um, I'd love to share a story where, um, I was figuring out the next wave of growth for the product and took a radical approach to testing out the initiative.

Yes, um, so, uh, in my role as, uh, the lead product manager for mobile in my current role, OK, got it. OK. Um, at Microsoft, uh, so my responsibility essentially is leading the mobile platform from vision, strategy, roadmap to execution and figuring out how can mobile as a product add value to the overall business of Yammer within Microsoft and Yammer is an enterprise collaboration and all that, um. So, what I'm gonna talk about is uh the instance where um I was tasked with figuring out uh the growth strategy for mobile and the radical approach here being, uh, the approach to testing out the initial set of hypotheses. Let me give some context on what the problem was and how I approached it and what was radical about it. So, um, This was a new customer segment that I had uncovered from data analysis as well as watching industry trends and understanding where we would need to invest over the next 1 to 3 years and um Further doing some customer and user research, it was very evident that this segment of first-line workers, so think about Yammer and it's essentially targeted towards uh desk workers or knowledge workers like us who are in front of their computers and uh a first-line worker segment, which is, let's say a worker at, at McDonald's and uh they have their part-time shifts and uh Do not care as much about connecting with the company. However, the company cares about these first line workers being super connected to the company culture because they're at the front lines. They understand the customer well. So this was an interesting segment for us to pursue so that we could grow Yammer, and this was an upcoming segment, and it was pretty evident that there was something in here and a huge opportunity that we could go and target. Now, as I was working through um how do we test out, um, actually, I take a pause there, um, doing some customer and user research, I had figured out uh some key needs of this segment. And uh one of the approaches to target this segment was to integrate with a sister product within Microsoft. So this was a product that these first line workers already used. We wanted to meet them where they were and uh the approach was to integrate with the product. Now, what was radical on the solution side is the approach I took to testing out the initial set of hypotheses. Um. Now, for this integration, we had a few different paths ahead of us. Um, we could wait and build out an amazing, super awesome, completely native mobile experience of Yammer within their sister product. Uh, that was option one. Option two was, uh, we could build a light web browser focused solution inside their mobile app. And uh while it would not be the most amazing of uh customer experiences, what it would allow us to do is test out the hypothesis quickly of are we able to meet these users where they are? Are we able to provide value to these users, fulfill those user jobs, uh, and then follow that up with building an awesome native mobile experience. So culturally in the organization, um, the trend often had been to. Go through a multi-quarter cycle and, uh, and then launch and essentially ship a product and uh maybe be done with it. But the approach I took was very different in terms of, hey, let's make sure we test our initial set of hypotheses, learn from it, iterate, and then build an amazing experience there. So the results of this were that we were able to launch this initial MVP over a period of 4 months. We're able to put it out there, uh, to customers, learn where the gaps were, and actually learn from, um, things, learn from this initial experience and also things we hadn't considered before, and then follow up with an extensive. Native to mobile experience. I'm happy to answer any questions you have around this.

OK, um, so I think it was We are a B2B2C product, so what it means is we sell to customers and then there are end employees of customers that also need to adopt our product. So my inspiration really came from the user research and the customer research where I saw diametrically opposite needs. Customers really wanted their employees to get connected and. Elaborate and share their ideas on this platform across the company. However, the end users, um, getting into their, uh, getting into their shoes and, you know, like I mentioned, I'm a part-time worker and, uh, I just want to come in to my shift, get my job done, uh, maybe I don't care as much about, um. Sharing my knowledge and expertise within the company. So I think this is diametrically opposite needs which, uh, which inspired me to think a bit differently in terms of, um, even if we build this, are they actually going, are end users actually going to use it? And it's important to validate this early on. Instead of going on a multi-quarter journey.

Yes, yes, so I, I would say like the user research and it's specifically the diametrically opposite needs of the segment which is very different from what we've seen in our research around desk or knowledge workers, um, and then also identifying the risk that it imposed on us, um, from a business standpoint, um, that was something, um, that, that inspired me.

Sure. Um, so, it was a few different steps. Um, the first part was, uh, clearly laying out, uh, the opportunity as well as the research insights uncovered with these two different segments. And then the second piece was mapping out, um,

Yeah, so the first part was really, uh, directly outlining the insights that I uncovered from this customer and user research. That was the framing, um, of my proposal. Um, the second piece was making sure I outlined. Um, how much would the effort, um, actually, let me take a pause. Why don't I think about this in a few seconds and, and, and mention it if that's OK. Fine. OK. Um, so I'm gonna talk about this in two different ways. So, one is what the proposal was, and two is how do I sell it to a bunch of different stakeholders that were involved in this equation. Now, from the proposal side, like I mentioned, uh, I made sure that I outlined the insights that I had uncovered in this research. And then I also made sure that I outlined the two different parts that were possible, the kind of engineering effort that would be needed along these paths, and then clearly outlined some of the big risks, uh, in both of the paths. Um, so this is on the proposal side. Now, when it comes to how did I actually sell this proposal and who did I sell it to. Uh, the way I look at it is I had 3, high-value stakeholders. One was leadership, the second was the sister team that we were integrating with, and then the third was, uh, my engineering team. Uh, I'll start with the leadership aspect. So, from a leadership side, it was really understanding um what was the business context at that time and uh what did uh GM care about and uh also what the marketing leadership cared about as, uh, as we took one direction or the other. And from a motivation standpoint, it was pretty clear that Uh, Yama was at this inflection point where we wanted to make sure we land a story with customers that we are investing in different areas and we provide differentiators, um, in our product targeted towards different user segments. And I try to align my proposal with that business motivation that it will only allow us to go faster and make an announcement uh if we see some success in our hypotheses early on. So that was on the leadership side. On the integration team side, um, it was actually very, um, Their support was more aligned to my lightweight proposal of building a light experience first and then following it up with a heavy native integration because um from a technology standpoint, it would have been easier for this partner team to support us with a light experience first. So it was really reducing the risk. Uh, for them as well. So I would say from an integration partner perspective, the incentives were aligned to, uh, building a supportive, to building a lightweight experience, and this in turn, um, helped me also convey to leadership that the risk of working cross-org, uh, was low with, uh, with the direction I was proposing. And then the last stakeholder I would say was on um the engineering team side and uh like I briefly mentioned, the same incentives that were Uh, in, in place with the integration partner team, we're also aligned with the engineering team. So, uh, we would need to shake up fewer things from a technology standpoint, uh, not get into in-depth analysis of, uh, which was the right path to go invest in longer term, even before we had done customer validation. So, I would say integration and engineering uh incentives actually helped me to uh further outline the different kind of business risks, cross-organizational risks and technology risks and sell that to leadership.

um, So I think um we started with an initial hypothesis that if we meet our target user segment, uh, where they are within this product of uh this partner team that we are working with, uh, it would be easy to generate initial interest and target those user jobs. Uh, but, um, I think part of the learning as we had expected, um, was that it Although it was easy to get top of the funnel users, it wasn't as easy to keep them engaged over, uh, over a period of time or really like have two week retention, uh, be at a stage that we were happy. Um, what we hadn't expected, uh, in the process was, um, sub segments of the different types of first line workers that we were targeting and how our product. How our initial Lightweight experience was actually very aligned with um the needs of one of the subsegments and uh that helped us actually dive deeper into um The different subsegments of users and. And target more functionality towards their user jobs. So, to summarize, the biggest learning was that, like on the positive side, it was that um Getting initial users is um going to be easy, but keeping them engaged is going to be a difficult journey and it creative journey, um, so while it was aligned with our initial expectations, um. We didn't think that we would take a lot of iterations to get to that point, so it was much harder in a way than we expected. Uh, we'd expected it's going to be as smooth as launching a light experience, learning from it, and then going in, um, integrating natively, uh, on mobile, but it took us quite a few steps before we were even ready to now put a native experience. Uh, and then the second learning really was that there were more sub-user segments than we expected, uh, and, um, getting that initial data from the light experience actually helped us reach to that conclusion and then do more research around that.