During the two years before the 2017 Every team is unique-and every launch, the Teams team grew from 30 individual on that team is unique. Our engineers who I hand-picked within goal was to provide something highly Microsoft to a large group recruited from customizable to adapt to different industry companies and universities. workflows and different types of users in different types of industries. While we studied what our competitors in this space were doing, we realized we CIOs today are charged not just would succeed if our value proposition to be the technology providers for focused on what we were good at. their organizations but to create the Microsoft has hundreds of millions infrastructure that supports employee of users of its other products, so we engagement and satisfaction. Our goal focused on building a tool that they with Teams was to help them galvanize could pick up very quickly. It's also easy their functions around that mission for non-Microsoft users to understand. In and create more energy, excitement, addition, we made sure that we created engagement-and a healthy dose of APIs that enable the integration of fun-into their organizations. That's hundreds of other applications what modern collaboration is about. into the product. TAKEAWAYS * In order to engineer an entirely new type of product, it helps to approach the design and engineering process in an entirely new way. * Using a new software solution as it is being developed is the best way to understand a user's pain points and address them. * Developing a new offering in a crowded space demands speed-but not so much speed that product quality suffers. 26