We Hit Refresh...and then Something Happened

This is a joint publication by Blair Glennon, Brandon LeBlanc, Dona Sarkar, Jason Howard, Jeremiah Marble, Marissa Zhang, Tyler Ahn and Vivek Elangovan

A year and a half ago, one of the most successful community-facing teams in the world, the Windows Insider Program decided to do the unthinkable: we Hit Refresh.

Because of the notoriety of the Windows Insider program, some of the changes were obvious even to the outside world. In November 2016, Paul Thurrott wrote a human-focused article on the transition of the Windows Insider Program from Gabe Aul to Dona Sarkar: “There is perhaps no more exciting change to the Windows Insider Program than the arrival this year of Dona Sarkar, who has almost single-handedly led a charge to evolve WIP into a community that can do good around the globe.”

It’s obvious to us on the inside that perhaps some of the changes, on the other hand, weren’t so evident. We’re not singling out Paul. He’s a superb writer with an eye for nuance. He wrote a persuasive story. His article earned him thousands of page views and comments like, “This piece is outstanding. Great combination of your inside knowledge, interviews/quotes, and forward thinking.”

All of this is true. Writers like Paul are forward-thinking, and perceive in this transition an important moment. However, while compelling, the “lone ninjacat” storyline is incomplete. There was nothing at all “single-handed” about our evolution. There are seven of us on the core Windows Insider team (eight if you count Marissa Zhang, our amazing intern over the past two summers). Then we are supported by hundreds of Marketers, Engineers, PMs, PR experts, lawyers, finance folks, content authors, village elders, and others, each playing an important role in what we’re doing. Let’s not forget the millions of Insiders, all around the world, who eagerly want to influence building a better Windows for everyone.

We don’t envy Paul. Tech writers have it hard. They search for fascinating stories. Pursue narratives their audiences will relish. They seek the sparkle. Polish down real-world clutter and complexity to reveal underneath a glorious diamond. By unearthing the brightest facets in their stone, they usually lop away the more-nuanced chunks.

It’s no mystery why these writers concentrate their stories on individuals, not teams. When telling the story of a tech gadget or a program, it’s just easier to describe the fearless leader on the stage with the microphone and the inspiring words. Rather than focus on the jumbled network of personalities and skills and relationships so critical to nearly every field of human endeavor, the writer illuminates the leader’s face to spotlight all the achievements and worry, all the failures and successes of the entire crew.

It’s simply a better story, this army of one.

Think Bill Gates (also some guy named Paul Allen who no one outside of tech or Seattle remembers).

Think Steve Jobs (and that guy named Woz who no one outside of tech or the Valley remembers).

Elon Musk alone. 

Zuck alone.

Even for leaders supported robustly by personalities like Jonathan Ives or Sheryl Sandberg, the supporting roles garner far less press—and even that press drops off quickly past #2 or #3. (Quick, name an Apple designer other than Ives, or anyone else on the Facebook operations team. Exactly. We can’t, either. We work in tech. We absolutely know they’re there. We know they’re important. But we don’t know who they are.)

And that’s a shame. At its best, the straightforward “hero worship” storyline is scary to, you know, normal people. People trying new things. New things that are hard. New things that sometimes fail. And even if these new things don’t fail they do take time and effort and a full team of committed people working just as hard if not harder on a given day than that leader on the pedestal who gets the microphone and the press tour.

So this use of the solitary leader to explain success oversimplifies. It trivializes the everyday, often-boring, and arduous struggles to make products happen.  People aspiring to create something new lament, “Well, Gates and Zuck and Dona are special. They did all this alone. They work all day, don’t sleep, and are superhuman. Since I’m not superhuman, what chance does a punk like me have?”

At worst, implying that even the smartest, most adored, most powerful, most insightful leader can do it all by herself with no help from others is disrespectful and demotivating to the powerful team that made it happen.

So this is why we are telling this story. Having a crew of hard-working of “wizards behind the curtain” is critical. It was critical to us, and it would be crucial to you too. No one is excellent at ALL parts of running a business. From setting forth a vision to supporting the vision with data, to hustling support and funding, determining goals, setting (and calculating and monitoring) success metrics, laying out specs and adapting them to reality, guiding the development process, engaging with community, iterating, testing, documenting—it’s crazy to think that one person can do all this alone.

Our own journey with the Windows Insider Program evolution started off no differently. The story of the Windows Insider Program evolution is not at all the solitary rise of a rockstar named Dona Sarkar. Rather, the story of our growth and change is that of the team that we’ve created and cultivated.

This is our story, the story of Something Happened. We wrote it together. For you.

We wrote it so we don’t forget it

Primarily we wrote down this story for our peers and friends. So many have come to us asking how we do it. How does our team execute on a clear set of goals while being so damn…happy? Why do we spend so much time talking about how much we love each other and our amazing Windows Insiders? How do we seem to be everywhere? Do we really not sleep?

We thought that we’d jot down for you a few things we’ve noticed that seemed to work for us. It’s our desire that the next generations of leaders—both here at Microsoft and in our industry—can not only try out these ideas to have an easier job of creating world-shaping products and services, but can also share with us what has worked for them as they build their teams. So we can all get better.  

We’d love to hear from each of you. What has worked for you? What of these didn’t work and needed to be rethought or thrown away in your own experience? What did we miss? What do we need to explain better? We hope that this article becomes a breathing, living thing, which we ourselves can also use as we go forward. 

Let’s co-create this thing together.

An epic battle for the Big Red Button to release Windows builds to #WindowsInsiders

Understand the Status Quo With No Assumptions

Dona was announced with great fanfare as the new leader of the Windows Insider Program on June 1, 2016. Like the fearless and inspiring Gabe Aul before her, Dona’s mission was to engage millions of global Insiders tirelessly working to help create a better Windows for everyone on the planet. 

Unlike Gabe, however, she was new to the Insider program. She was not a founding member of the team. She didn’t know every single one of the community’s many jokes. She now had the red button, but what exactly did the ninjacat have to do with it? What exactly is a narwhal? What do either of these have to do with a unicorn? She didn’t fully understand the power structures, or the assumptions that had already been made, or the ways in which her perception of the program differed from the reality. 

Other than Gabe, she also didn’t really know who else was working on “her” new program or where the key opportunities were for growth. So she set about finding out.

When you’re new to a space, don’t make any assumptions or take anyone’s word for law. The first few weeks should just be about a series of 1:1 conversations with every single person over what’s going well and what can be provided. Identify trends that people keep repeating.

Use your fresh eyes to identify opportunities

As Dona examined the Insider community, she discovered that Insiders didn’t view themselves as only early beta testers. They considered themselves part of the Windows team. All the highly engaged Insiders had something in common: their Twitter steams were a sea of inside jokes, playful teasing, ideas for UI mockups, asks of people to upvote their logged Feedback Hub items, memes of Gabe wearing wigs and running from pirates. Windows Insiders thought of their fellow Insiders as close friends who talked to them and each other every day. They saw themselves as a community.

She knew that to do something interesting with this but she needed a partner with skills in this area.

In the initial days of joining the team, she met many of the other engineering people involved with the Insiders: Gabe, Bill Karagounis, TJ Rhodes, Brandon LeBlanc, Jason Howard.

Only later, after meeting what she’d been told was “the full team,” Dona learned there were other people also thinking about Insiders too. There was "some dude" in the Marketing org named Jeremiah Marble and his fellow teammate Tyler Ahn that some people referenced. These folks had been on the Insider team since 2014, working with Gabe Aul and Bill Karagounis to incorporate voices of the customers into Windows. However, they were never mentioned in news articles or product conversations. Dona was curious to find out more about this other side of the Insider program, people who had nothing online except a couple of rarely-used Twitter profiles.

When you’re new, you have a tremendous opportunity to look at the landscape and the team as they have never been seen before. Use your fresh eyes to identify things others may have overlooked because of “how things have always been done”.

Dona and Jeremiah doing what they do best--plotting some chaos

Make a great first impression with your new team. Lead with empathy.

At their first meeting, Dona and Jeremiah—strangers to each other—exchanged basic pleasantries, career backgrounds and travel stories. Usually turf-defending would start there. Other people might have just divided up the labor and called it a day. â€œHow about I handle builds and you handle events?” But neither was particularly interested in drawing boundaries.

Instead, both employed basic empathy techniques.

“Was it weird to go from spending so many years working as a software developer and PM, and then work in international development in LatAm, Africa, and Asia—then come back and go to a fancy MBA school?” (Dona knew the importance of understanding the currencies of the humans she spoke too—and she had a web browser and the desire to do her homework.) She continued, “I just spoke at a bunch of MBA schools in Europe. One was INSEAD. Didn’t you spend some time there?”

Jeremiah furrowed his brow in that way everyone yells at him for. (He needs to work on his smiling abilities.) “Yes, I loved spending more time in France. Why did you choose MBA schools and not engineering programs? I know that you’ve written YA fiction and designed fashion (he’d also done some research), but I didn’t know that you spent much time talking to folks in collared shirts.”

Dona was ready for this question. â€œI wanted to learn about MBAs. I wrote up a thing on it. Here.” She brought up the post on her phone. â€œI believe engineers need more business people in their lives. The opposite is also true.”

The connection was made. 

Both Dona and Jeremiah came to that first conversation with independent but dovetailing desires to make this work. Both of them had shared interests. Both were highly passionate about helping consumers engage with Microsoft products and also the people behind those products. They wanted to make our products better for everyone on earth, not just people living in Redmond or New York or Silicon Valley. They wanted to listen to the feedback that Insiders shared with them: shared because these Insiders too wanted Microsoft products to work better.

Moreover, both Dona and Jeremiah had something to gain. Neither could make this happen without the other. Indeed, seeking to stand up a strong counterpart in another part of the org was something Dona specifically worked to achieve. This sort of a strong partnership was something she was used to. In all her previous engineering jobs, Dona had worked in trios. Three people were assigned to work together, one in software development (dev), one in quality, and one in product management (PM) roles. They collaborated and challenged each other. They supported each other. No decision was ever solo: it was the decision of the trio. 

This sort of a support structure was something Dona wanted for the Insider program. In the early days, and for the first time in her career, Dona had no assigned counterparts. The decisions would be far scarier since:

a) They affected millions of people almost immediately and

b) They were to be made by a single leader with no checks and balances of whether the idea was terrible or not

During that first conversation, Jeremiah told Dona what he and Tyler had been doing the past two years, working on opportunities to bring Insiders together. As he talked, Dona realized that she wouldn’t have to do it alone. Jeremiah and Tyler had tons of experience engaging with Insiders at physical and virtual events. They understood Insiders as community already. They just needed to be empowered as partners, not just as forgotten bystanders who occasionally printed t-shirts. 

“Imma change that, like now,” Dona said semi-outloud. “I want to know what you guys think we should do. And then I’d like to help us do it.”

When meeting new people put yourself in the other person’s shoes. Your intentions do not matter. All that matters is how you make that other person feel.

People will tell you everything if you give them the space to. Let people talk. Your goal is to find out a few things: How are they currently feeling? What makes them tick? What is important to them? 

You can only build a real relationship with them if you try to understand their currency and goals. What drives them? Is it money? Fame? Power? Being promoted? Being respected? Title? Gaining experience? Becoming an expert?

Ensure that everyone has their voice heard

Jeremiah had never had this conversation about collaborating before on the Windows Insider Program. “There’s a lot we can do. We’ve been thinking about this a lot.”

“Tell me.”

Jeremiah looked at her suspiciously. He’d been down this road before. But Dona really seemed to want to hear his thoughts.

He responded deliberately and thoughtfully, in the way he always does. “Insiders being aren’t just bonded to you, the leader. They’re also bonded to each other. It’s a web, not a b-tree.” (Jeremiah has a Computer Science degree.) “It’s always been the plan that we build communities within the Insider population. We can support these groups of similar people, where Insiders make suggestions and bolster each other. We can turn these interactions into something more. We’ve just never fully completed the experiment.”

“We should do that.” Dona has never been one to question an experiment.

And at that moment, Something Happened. Jeremiah had identified the engineering co-owner for the mission he’d always had: to expand the Windows Insider Program into the Windows Insider Program AND Community. It would be a community of people influencing the technology being built, and making a lasting impact in their worlds. Meanwhile, Dona had found the people who complemented her core engineering skills to meet the business goals of Windows.

That day, Team Something Happened was born.

Tyler, Jeremiah, Marissa and Dona at E3 2016

Just a few weeks later, Tyler organized a series of events at the E3 conference where many Insiders would be in attendance. She invited Dona, Jeremiah and the Insider team's engineering intern, Marissa, to attend. This was Dona and Marissa's first foray into meeting Insiders face to face. They were amazed at the incredibly diversity of the people they met: young and old. All genders, all professions. They met app devs and artists and IoT fans and emerging coders. They started to realize how much the Insiders craved this kind of face-to-face meeting with not just the team, but also each other.

The next person to (re) join the team was Blair Glennon, the Insider Marketing team's summer intern from the previous year. Coming back to the Insider program after finishing his second year of business school, Blair had the distinct characteristic of being the only person who was an Insider BEFORE he joined the core team. Blair was initially supposed to work on another project in Windows Marketing as a returning full-time employee, but he wound up moonlighting on the Insider team for so long, it became his one-and-a-half-time job.

Something Happened was pretty pleased that Blair was willing to work so hard and so diligently on this effort. When you’re running one of the largest communities of people in the world using tech, with millions of people submitting exabytes of data and feedback in order to improve products for billions of people, well, it doesn’t hurt to have someone with a strong data analytics background on the team.

Very organically, a few fundamental truths emerged as the principles for the scrappy little team.

Let culture form and evolve as new people join. DO NOT make people change who they are or their skill sets to fit a pre-defined culture. (Although ask Blair about the toga (he secretly LIKES it))

Blair and the great toga incident

Ignore your org structure (sorry, upper management!)

At the beginning, Dona didn’t have direct reports on her engineering team. She was an individual contributor on Bill Karagounis’s team. And as she, Tyler and Jeremiah got into planning the various projects (like Create-A-Thons) we wanted to execute, we realized that we’d need help. We had broad aspirations for our program to bring together creative and technical Insiders in the same city, seeking to solve local community problems.

“Do you mind if we have someone from your (marketing) team help with the event space booking? What about someone from your (analytics) team; can we ask for help to understand which Insiders in a given area are most active?” she would ask Jeremiah, Tyler or Blair.

They were always quick to respond, “It’s OUR team.” And they meant it. It didn’t matter who an individual reported to. All that mattered was that the business goal was achieved.

Once Brandon LeBlanc and Jason Howard joined Dona’s reporting structure on the engineering side, nothing changed. There was no boundary between engineering and marketing. There was only the Windows Insiders Team, Something Happened, working on the exact same goals with individuals who had different functions and different skill sets. 

Dona, Jason and Brandon's first attempts to take group selfies

To this day, Dona & reports are free to ask their Marketing counterparts for help on data analysis (poor Blair gets asked this at least twice a week – but he LIKES it) and the Marketing folks are free to ask the engineering folks for cool “Insiders debugging” stories (Jason knows them all!). Because the goals are the same and we’re all bought in, the reporting chains are irrelevant.

Think beyond your org structure. Who are the key players who need to make things happen? Our team is technically a “virtual team,” or “v-team,” but we don’t call it that. We have a team name; we have team meetings weekly; we have team lunches; we have team offsites (we like to lock ourselves in a room for 4 hours and “hack” solutions to problems). We present to execs in all parts of the organization with the whole team. We are not a v-team, we are a team. Yes, according to the org chart, half of us happen to sit in the Marketing org and the other half in the Engineering org, but you would be hard-pressed to figure out who reports to who.

Team Hackathons are our favorite way to solve the hard problems!

Have one clear set of goals for all disciplines

Early on, we co-created the goals for the Insiders program together. Soon, it became clear that Jeremiah was the one who was going to ask, “Which of our goals does that line up with?” when we all came up with whims and fancies. He never overruled or dismissed, but always asked the right questions so that everybody decided whether an activity lined up with the two Insider team goals for the year.

1.     Leverage Insiders feedback to create a better Windows for everyone

2.     Ensure the Insiders community is empowered to achieve their goals

To this day, that set of goals remains unchanged, though the tactics have changed many, many times. Whenever someone has an idea, they get checked against the goals below as well as the core audiences (Tech Enthusiasts, IT Professionals, Developers, Creatives) we are targeting.

We keep each other accountable that we are keeping the promise we made our Insiders rather than pursing some interesting challenge for us.

Whether the team member happens to physically sit in dev, quality, PM, Marketing, Research, Design, wherever, make sure the set of goals is agreed to and enforced. Write them down somewhere visible and make sure people can see them every single day. Make sure every tactic ALL the people work on matches one of the goals.

Jeremiah playing podcast host to hear about Marissa's experience on Something Happened

Keep the Lights On

One thing unique about our team is that hardly anyone is ONLY doing the job they started in. We come from backgrounds in business development, data analysis, computational linguistics, computer science, product support and communications. We have outside interests and side hustles. We are all passionate; we all believe deeply in what we’re doing. And we need ALL of these diverse skills and experiences and personalities to care for our tribe of Windows Insiders—and these millions are WAY more diverse than we are!

Given that we are a small team trying to solve big problems, everyone “does the needful” to achieve our goals, no matter what our job descriptions say. Currently Tyler is engineering a website revamp, Jason is thinking about Microsoft Store webcast events, Blair is building insights about the Insider community based on data, Brandon is demo’ing features to IT Professionals. Our newest member Vivek Elangovan is researching Insiders who attend the Adobe Max conference. Dona is live tweeting our shenanigans and Jeremiah is writing a strategy document.

None of these activities are in our job descriptions. And it does not matter. We’re on a mission with shared goals, not here to punch the timeclock around releases.

We’re all fully aware that if the work planned for the customers isn’t done, our team doesn’t have the impact we need to release a reliable product and maintain the happy community. There is no winning if others on the team lose.

The key ingredient here are a shared mission and trust. We had to trust that the other people will do the right thing, and if they cannot, they will ask for help. We learned that when people are trusted, they act in a trustworthy manner.

Scrappy teams, startups and hackathon groups don’t care if engineers only engineer or if marketers market. People do the needed to make sure the lights stay on, not mattering if it was scavenging for furniture or making executive decisions. Try operating in this way in your team and watch how people’s talents emerge.

I like how no one is concerned about the unconscious Jeremiah in the corner

Establish Ownership

One of the early things we did on our team was assign end-to-end ownership of each tactic and audience that lines up with our goals to a member of Something Happened. 

For example: Tyler is the owner for our “biggest fans”, the global fan programs that stemmed from the Insiders community all over the world as well as the Insider MVP program, our Insiders who help large communities of people with tech. How she brings all of these programs together under the Insiders strategy, opportunities and events is up to her. We are all here to help, but she owns the plan end-to-end. We are happy to be her minions to execute.

Brandon owns working with engineering teams on their product storytelling and then sharing these stories with Insiders. How he does it is up to him. He can stand in a town square and yell into a megaphone for all he wants. We trust he will do the right thing seeing that he’s 10 years of communications expertise. Instead of yelling, he however has decided to build a flight dashboard for the website where Insiders can see what’s in each build. He’s going to code the dashboard himself and then work with Tyler to integrate into the website.

Blair is responsible for Insiders who want to use our software in their businesses – including IT Professionals. He is free to do whatever is needed to communicate with them and get them what they need to Insider in their businesses (including asking us to call their managers and coerce!) 

Jason is responsible for the Insiders who are independent tech enthusiasts. How he keeps them engaged and feeling like a part of the team is up to him. Currently, he engaged heavily on Twitter, doing webcasts and writing behind-the-scenes articles.

Each owner crowdsources ideas from Something Happened (and sometimes from Insiders!) on HOW they should solve. They can then choose what they want to do and who needs to help them. As the senior people on the team, it’s Dona’s and Jeremiah’s job to be enthusiastic participants, not executive “approvers”.

Our team follows the simple model of “hire a team of smart people, give them real problems to work on, leave them alone till they ask for your help and watch them have impact.” This has led to a feeling of ownership and being able to apply whatever creative ideas the person wants to get the job done.

We believe that when you tell someone what to do and how to do it, the solution is now yours and the individual no longer feels accountable or empowered. We are not in the business of micromanaging each other. We simply don’t have the time, scale or skills to do that. Instead, we bring the “whys” to the team per the business goals of Microsoft, assign ownership and let everyone work their magic.

Jason's Mixer webcasts are always an adventure

Share who you are: “Bring Your Whole Self to Work”

We always keep in mind that email that Satya sent asking everyone to bring their “whole self to work”. One of fun discoveries we made this year as a team was that every single one of us has some unique skill that technically has nothing to do with our job, but makes us a true superhero on the team for the benefit of the Insiders.

It all started when Jason hosted the bug bash webcast for the Insiders. To everyone’s surprise, Jason is easily able to talk to a screen, debug an issue and remain funny and composed. This is NOT a skill most people possess (especially Dona and Jeremiah who talked VERY awkwardly to a screen once and every since people very politely ask us NOT to do that ever again). It turns out Jason was a radio host in college. This is something that’s natural and fun for him. He’s really, really good at it. And from Jason’s deep skills, the monthly Beam/Mixer webcast was born! From sourcing the parts to building the Mixer-machine to hosting the webcast, Jason owns the whole thing end-to-end. 

Soon, we started to discover everyone’s secret identities. Tyler spent many years in developing nations and understands the problems with tech usage in emerging markets first-hand. This is VITAL information seeing that we have Insiders in every country in the world not just the developed world. Brandon is a superfan of Star Trek and helps us understand the psychology of fandom. Blair has worked in IT supporting Windows and has strong empathy for the misunderstood IT workers who are our top customers. Jeremiah has a decade of experience debugging business models, which is invaluable for our long-term strategy. Dona is a fiction writer and if she can keep the attention of teenage girls, she can certainly keep the attention of tech execs!

Our newest member, Vivek is a side-hustle film-maker, exactly the person we need to seed our Creative Insiders group.

We highly encourage the team to understand their whole self and bring that to work. After all, if we are to serve a global audience, having the broadest understanding of that audience is our secret superpower. Bill Karagounis even got into this by bringing his Sound Engineering background to making our Fundamentals team videos actually sound awesome!

Bring your “outside work” skillsets to work. Encourage your teammates to do the same. If you’re a developer and happen to be good at making cool videos—do that. No business benefitted from keeping people in neat little boxes with labels.

Idea->Experiment->Project

Gone are the days that we need to come up with a complete end-to-end plan to try out an idea. Once someone comes up with an idea, they run a small experiment (like a few days or a few weeks) to see if the idea has potential. Once they decide it’s worth the time and effort, we make it into a project.

Experiments are always successful if you finish them. It either worked or it didn’t. Either way, you have more information. 

Something Happened runs on ideas that turns into experiments. Tyler went to Grace Hopper to better understand what technical women want from communities to help them feel supported. Brandon and Jason want to road-trip to Texas visiting Microsoft stores and running Mixer steams to drive up tech enthusiast engagement – if we can find travel budget, do the experiment. Blair heard from Insiders they wanted a better way to “close the loop” on their feedback so he works with Data Science to figure out the best way to tell Insiders their bugs are fixed–once the initial experiment was done with high click throughs on the toast popups, the Blair SIUF project was born. Dona wants to figure out if we can train Insiders in IT skills to with LinkedIn Learning to prepare them for jobs – let’s do a little pilot with 5 people. Jeremiah wants to figure out how to match Insiders to each other when they have needs and abilities that match—let’s do that as our OneWeek hackathon.

We have run a hundred experiments this year. Some have become real projects, some have not returned the results we love. But at least we know the answer.

Having the ability to try new ideas in a safe and encouraging space is extremely important to any team. Co-workers and leaders should happily encourage each other to run these and participate in each other’s experiments. It’s the only way to truly live a growth-mindset.

We like to gather in public places and yell

Get out of the office and email. Embrace the ridiculous.

Dona and Jeremiah’s first meeting was not in a conference room. To this day, most of Something Happened’s meetings are not. We’ve met in the lobby of 37, gathered around the not-Master Chief statue. We’ve met over coffee and drinks. We’ve met in the middle of the street. We’ve met at Taco Bell. When one of us is having a bad day, we ping our alias with the source of our ire and everyone supports us with funny gifs and inside jokes. In short, we are not just co-workers, we are friends. Because we are friends, we trust each other and want to help each other. 

You do not just talk to your friends over email and in the office. Set up some sort of informal chat stream aka Microsoft Teams or What's App

If there is a cake, that cake will get eaten.

Don’t dismiss ideas. Debate them.

This has been one of our biggest challenges—to not dismiss concerns because they don’t seem important. In the face of SO many obstacles (time, money, wanting to protect our Insiders, management goals), it’s hard to take the time to deeply consider every concern people on the team have. But we have to. Without listening to every concern, our powerful team would feel disempowered and this important work would fall apart.

We listen. Openly and actively listen. We default to yes and then scope the challenge at hand. We always assume positive intent from the team.

Then we figure out if the concern is a “we’ve never done this before and we’re scared” or a “this cannot be done legally, technically or safely” and the impact to our evergreen business goals.

One of the more recent examples of this was when we talked about flighting builds from both RS3 and RS4 to our Insiders. Brandon and Jason were convinced Insiders would not love this and it would be a burden on our team. Dona brushed away their concern and it turned out—they were right. We absolutely could not scale. For RS4, we have some refining to do.

Leaders must actively and openly listen to every concern. Then try to discern fear from real issues and make decisions that will either address or nullify concerns. Real concerns are a sign that people care deeply. This is a GOOD thing.

Praise Publicly, Criticize Privately

We talk about each other. A lot. We talk about each other in interviews. We talk about each other on social. We talk about each other to our management. We know the best way to be powerful is to pull someone up, not push them down and we take this very seriously. We are constantly finding ways for our teammates to succeed and achieve their goals and we are each others’ biggest ambassadors and sponsors. We push each other out of our comfort zones to do things we might be slightly afraid of, but need to do anyway. 

Just a week ago, (despite *some of us* claiming stage fright) almost our whole team was on stage at Ignite doing an AMA with the IT Pro and Enterprise Developer audience. We spoke very highly of each other’s work and the feedback we heard was, “It’s obvious you guys love each other and your jobs.”

We do. We truly do.

This does not mean we don’t have some truly epic disagreements. A recent one that stands out is a “heated discussion” between Dona and Jeremiah about how much funding we should allocate to research on the Creatives audience. The disagreement ended with certain people storming from the room, swearing never to speak to each other again (we made up 15 minutes later after lattes were consumed).

Jason, Dona and Brandon have had several tiffs over flight schedules and such too—but always in private

The power in our team is that not only were we able to overcome the disagreement, but we also know that we CAN disagree with each other and still emerge as friends afterward. Our relationships have stood that test.

We also believe that one of the greatest gifts we can give each other is critical feedback and safe space to try out implementing that feedback. We never give feedback as a way to push someone down in a public or humiliating way. Instead, we want to help each other be more successful, we trust and appreciate the feedback.

So there you have it. That’s how we work. The most important thing though is this: we truly care deeply for each other in team Something Happened. We trust each other enough to be vulnerable. We strive to make our teammates WANT to come to work every single day. This desire to be here makes our team magical and we hope these lessons will apply to you and your team to live our joint mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.  

Thank you!

Something Happened