CTO Straight Talk - Issue 4 - 25

points and frustration ourselves and were

fun with it. We were creating software

motivated to address them.

to support this world where the lines
between work and personal lives are

Every Friday, we had 60-second

blurring. Individuals will take work

demos by each developer on the team to

home and weave it into their personal

showcase what they had built to the rest

lives, but they also expect to enjoy their

of the engineers, program managers, and

work. If people had more fun using

designers on the team. Every week, the

Microsoft Teams, we surmised, they

product improved.

would be more productive and happier.

It was hugely beneﬁcial that both

" Fun " may not be a driving principle

Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, and co-

of most office productivity software.

founder, Bill Gates, were huge fans of

But as we built Teams, we focused on

our vision. Having that basic prototype

ensuring that fun was an important

up and running, however, was even

element of the product. There were some

more critical in galvanizing the rest of

within the company who questioned

the company. Several senior folks at

our decision to add features like Giphy

Microsoft got their teams dogfooding

integration, emojis, editable memes, or

the Teams prototype. This was important

direct messaging functionality.

in winning their trust in a team like ours

But those turned out to be some

that was running so fast. They could

of our customers' favorite features.

see that what we were building was a
complement to our other products
within the company.

THE FUTURE OF
COLLABORATION

The marketplace was changing, too.

We launched Microsoft Teams globally

We weren't the only company trying to

in February 2017, two years after we

carve out a space in collaboration. This

began. And the numbers have been even

drove us to move quickly, although not so

better than we expected. Today, more

quickly that quality suffered. In fact, we

than 500,000 organizations and 91 of the

ultimately decided to postpone our beta

Fortune 100 companies have adopted

version by a few months, because we

Microsoft Teams, and adoption

just didn't think it was ready yet.

continues to increase.

THE ROI OF FUN
The biggest challenge was getting our
customers excited about the product.
Our customers trust us, but they
needed to see the value of this new tool.
What became clear in our ﬁrst year in
development was that for this to work,
the product needed to be fun to use.
And, thus, we needed to have some

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CTO Straight Talk - Issue 4

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of CTO Straight Talk - Issue 4
