Looking back on a whirlwind six months leading Microsoft Teams

On February 25, I had the privilege of taking over as the product and engineering leader for Microsoft Teams after my longtime colleague Brian MacDonald retired. I joined an amazing group of people and one of the tech industry’s fastest-growing cloud services. Within a week, the world transformed as the global pandemic spread bringing exceptional change to our customers and growth to Microsoft Teams. I had experienced spikes in the growth of SharePoint and Office 365, but this was unprecedented. In days, we saw the type of adoption that had previously taken years. It was a daunting and exhilarating opportunity to partner with teams across Microsoft to support our customers. Satya often reinforces the importance of a Growth Mindset—and this took that and more. I have learned so much over the past several months and thought it would be helpful to share.

Just a week into the job, we decided that the Teams organization would work fully from home, days before the rest of Microsoft to get ahead of the learning curve. Those days were essential to transitioning our engineering to be fully remote and shaping our guidance and capacity planning for the growth ahead. Adoption accelerated from 20 million daily active users to 75 million. There were 5 billion call and meeting minutes—600% more than just months earlier. Teams became mission critical to keeping hospitals, schools, governments, and businesses functioning as region after region transitioned to operating remotely.

Customers reached out to talk—to ask advice and give feedback. The leaders and I talked to many directly and reviewed learnings from our colleagues around the world as they were posted to our Customer Engagement Channel in Microsoft Teams. They were feeling the pressure too, fighting for their jobs and businesses. I was humbled by their bet on Microsoft 365 and our all-in-one hub for teamwork backed with a trusted security, privacy, and compliance foundation. We took none of this for granted.

We had to make decisions and execute in unprecedented timeframes—to scale our service 10X+ and bring features—both frankly some catch-up and some differentiated like Microsoft Teams Together Mode—to customers in days versus months. Thanks to years of foundational work to build an elastic architecture across Microsoft 365 and Azure, we were able to meet the growth needs in Teams and highly connected services including SharePoint. Special thanks go to the Azure team and the Teams communications service team (IC3) led by Scott Van Vliet and many others for incredible work and support. It was the very best of "One Microsoft". In core Teams engineering, we redefined the release cycle for the client working in three parallel codebases at once, which is why you’ve seen product releases and blog updates every few weeks.

Given my six-month anniversary in the role, I reflected on the strategies we implemented during this exceptional time. Here is some of that thinking.

Build the framework: Prioritize planning and alignment

Running an organization of a thousand people is different from a hundred people. With a small team, you can almost instantly pivot when you learn something new. With over a thousand people, rapid change requires more thought in planning, decision-making, and communication.

The Teams organization is entrepreneurial and scrappy and moves very quickly, but to get that to the next level of scale, we needed to make sure everyone was aligned. It's like a symphony: Each musician is incredible, but you need a little bit of conducting for the composer’s intent to shine through.

So, we began by writing down our engineering priorities and had a lot of conversations about whether they were the right ones. Are they realistic? How can we do more? Where can we afford to do less—or at least later? Where are the gaps in funding so we can fill them in to execute an ambitious plan? Where are architectural dependencies impacting our flexibility and can they be changed? There is never a perfect plan, but we moved quickly to find a good balance between waterfall and agile needed for a business of our scale.

We learned how to harness our organization’s creativity, passion, and entrepreneurial drive within a lightweight but structured planning framework, which gave us the best of both worlds. The velocity at which we've shipped features in the past few months is as high as I've seen from any team at Microsoft in my 28 years here. Much more to come.

Bust down silos: Deepen visibility to execute across large teams

Executing an engineering plan requires balancing creativity and discipline. On a large team in the software industry, you may have a couple of thousand people delivering feature updates every day. You need to make sure those features address what customers actually want and need.

Managing this in a large organization requires visibility into what everyone is doing, and for that we used Azure DevOps. In the first weeks after COVID-19 hit the US in earnest, we created a new view in Azure DevOps called COVID reprioritization. As we listened to hundreds of customers, examined the collaboration market, and came up with ideas, we entered dozens of work items. We created a query that everybody from the newest employee to Satya Nadella himself could use if they were interested in our pandemic pivot.

This approach gave us so much clarity into how thousands of people were reorienting their priorities, which was another key to the steady cadence of new product updates we were able to ship. And we ran it all connected to channels in Teams and content in SharePoint so we can move quickly while everyone around the world could be on the same page. In my career working on collaboration tools, I’ve always tried to have our engineering team not just build a product—but evolve a culture—that would help our customers as a best practice as well.

Keep learning: Foster collaboration and a growth mindset

The company culture at Microsoft emphasizes a growth mindset that assumes there is far more we don't know than we do. It’s critical to challenge our thinking and tap into others’ perspectives and expertise.

Our hero feature Together mode, released earlier this year, was an example of that. The concept came in part from Jaron Lanier, who works on virtual reality at Microsoft Research.

Jaron, among his many other vocations, occasionally plays guitar for a late-night TV show. The show’s host was struggling to perform his monologue without a live audience, and Jaron came up with a magical idea to help the host and his viewers feel connected, which became the basis for Together mode.

We also brainstormed with the Xbox and HoloLens teams around high-speed video and user engagement. We met with LinkedIn folks who brought a lot of passion about running productive meetings and how that works within their unique company culture.

Many ideas came from those conversations, and we’ve got a number of them already in the pipeline. It’s exciting to have a deep well of features to draw from as we deliver on already in-flight work.

Dig deeper: Identify implicit unmet needs

You learn early on in product development that solving for the explicit unmet need is the easy part. Somebody tells you they need nine people on the screen as opposed to four. Check. We can build that.

The more difficult hurdle—but the one that can lead to a breakthrough if you get it right—is identifying implicit unmet needs. Nobody walks around saying they love being in meetings all day long and that they're all perfect. Everybody, including us, grumbles about things they wish were better. So we're furiously thinking and listening to customers about how the product can address those harder-to-define needs.

Between March and June, our engineering team spoke to more than 900 customers, and our salesforce talked to many more. We listened to CIOs, teachers, doctors, utility technicians, you name it. We sorted through the explicit asks while also trying to identify those implicit, unarticulated needs using data, research, and telemetry signals.

Much of the work we’ve done to make meetings more dynamic and inclusive came from solving these problems as Teams went from an emerging workplace productivity and communication tool to an indispensable component of education, health care, and business operations.

Put people first: Well-being is more important than ever

Early on, people were saying we needed to work nonstop through the summer. There's just too much work to do. All teams are tempted to work at an unsustainable pace when the pressure is high. But we said no. Even the Teams organization is going to take time off. We need people to be able to do their best work, and by giving them a little room to breathe, they will come back recharged and put more energy into the next wave.

We have a vibrant workforce and supporting our employees, particularly during turbulent times, is paramount. We know many are juggling increased caregiving and homeschooling responsibilities outside work, and there is a lot of uncertainty about what our lived reality will look like in the months ahead. Our customers are feeling the same way. Employee well-being is hitting home for organizations everywhere, and as we work through how to help our own people keep balance in their lives, a lot of that thinking is making its way into the product.

The new Reflect messaging extension is one example, helping leaders, managers, and teachers check in and provide a more supportive environment. Another is the “Communities” app in Teams to help entire organizations stay connected at a time when companywide decisions and operations are in flux.

Tech is a very disruptive business. But even in an industry synonymous with rapid change there are inflection points that challenge you to completely reassess how you respond to customer needs and market demand. This was one of those moments.

My first six months leading Teams has been one of the most disruptive stretches I have experienced in this industry, but also perhaps the most rewarding. This morning I saw a post from a fifth grade teacher getting ready to welcome her class with Together Mode, and it made me smile to think about everything it took to make the moment happen. I was fortunate to come into a healthy situation with a great product, an outstanding team, and a world-class company culture. Huge thanks to Brian MacDonald, the Teams leadership, and colleagues across Microsoft for their unbelievable support in scaling Teams faster than anyone could have ever predicted.

It has been a true privilege to work with this team as we continue to deliver new experiences to tens of millions of customers across the globe. We are grateful we’ve been able to respond to the moment and help our customers do the same. We look forward to continuing this work and reimagining the future together.