The Hidden Challenges of Transforming User Experience for 100,000+ Employees: A Product Manager's Insight

Hm, um, and just to clarify, um, technically complex is what we're going for, or does it mean product and design complexity?

Sure, sure. Um, I'm just taking a few seconds to frame this. Um, Yeah, so I'm going to pick um The same example of the complete end to end user experience transformation and uh this was, uh, this is highly complex because of three different reasons. Um, the first one was, um, user on the user experience side. Uh, we were transitioning Yammer from being a product position towards, um, teamwork, which is interacting with your colleagues multiple times a day in a group of like 1520 people. To a product that was now targeting 50,000, 100,000 employees in a company and you interact maybe a couple of times a week. So the interaction model of users in terms of how do you consume content, how do you post content, this fear of posting content in a small group versus a larger group, um, and really thinking through that experience on multiple aspects of the product. Uh, meant that this was Uh, difficult from, uh, getting it right, uh, for, for this user experience. So that was one. the second piece was really the design complexity on mobile, and, uh, why this was complex is because we wanted to make sure that we were building the mobile product. From a design side in a way that was um Uh, consistent with Microsoft's fluent design language, uh, but also it was the best in class in terms of, um, iOS and Android, uh, design guidelines. And then at the same time, um, We wanted a coherent experience across mobile and web, so there was an element of making sure there was buy-in from the web team, uh, to. Uh, to actually leverage the designs that we've done on mobile. So that was 2nd. And then the 3rd piece I mentioned this briefly earlier was on, uh, the data side, and the team had not been doing any AB testing before, um, and making sure that Um, I was able to ramp up the team on how to AB test, have the appropriate infrastructure around it, and actually, so, uh, the user complexity, the design complexity of making sure the experience was coherent, not just within different apps across Microsoft, but also the best in class in terms of iOS and Android experiences and then, um, from a data side, making sure that, um, we're being truly data-driven and, uh. You know, time crunch mode is what made certain years of complexity,

right? Sure. Let me give you an example. Um, so when we're talking about um the user experience on mobile, um, we Uh, let's take the core app, uh, information architecture, and, um, this includes, you know, when you land on an app, um, there's the home screen of the app, uh, there are different components of there are tabs in an app, um, and Everything from uh the visual hierarchy to the placement of different components to actually how uh our mobile app would deeply integrate into other mobile apps, um, and doing it in a way that when we were putting this experience out there, we were able to sell it to customers that this is an experience which works great for your end users, but hey, it's also compliant. And it looks familiar with other Microsoft products, and it's uh it's. Taking uh Apple's, um, Apples like human interface guidelines and uh the best in class of uh Google's design, material design guidelines in play, um. Uh, while we're putting this out there. So, I think the complexity was balancing these different design systems, fluent design system of Microsoft as in Android systems, um, and having those trade-offs. And picking those trade-offs in a way that allowed us to sell our product better. Does that help? I have to jump into it? Uh,

I see, I see. So, uh, just, just one clarification there, um, there are two different set of products, uh, projects. The one that I'm currently talking about is, was native iOS and native Android experience and the process of the redesign. So, um, this was native and not like react

Yeah, yeah, so I would say, um, And the complexity was just really balancing these different elements to launch it in a time sensitive way and um what takes it a little bit beyond what's a usual day in the life of a PM is uh really the aspect that uh this was being done in an organization. After 10 years of no detailed thought being given to what a quality high bar user experience looks like, um, and then making sure that there was buy-in from different stakeholders to actually, uh, adopt that direction. Um, and then the technical complexity there was really in terms of, um, managing like the experiment infrastructure and running the AB test smoothly. OK.