Our products are, at the end of the day, the ultimate deliverable. Developers are a discerning audience with a near zero tolerance for fluff and vaporware. They can be fierclely loyal if a product is great, but will quickly become flighty when quality suffers. Great products cannot exist without a vibrant content ecosystem that onboards developers rapidly, pointing them firmly in the direction of the "pit of success".
The Product CDA team is dedicated to working directly with Engineering, Marketing and across the CDA organization in the relentless persuit of helping to continually refine our products. We do this by channeling community feedback directly to engineering, as well as putting a laser focus on our content and messaging so that our marketing efforts are targeted, automated and above all else, congruent with the needs of all developers. After all, there are only two types of developers - those who are currently our customers and those who will be, because our products are that good.
Microsoft is a large and diverse organization. The product teams differ wildy in both tempermant and outlook. While many product teams have embraced a "growth mindset", many are understandably adhering to the "old way" of doing things. Old habits do die hard. These Product teams require a different touch that will primarily be built on personal relationships and mutual respect.
We have done a phenomenal job regaining the trust of developers in the past few years. The gains Microsoft has made have been nothing short of remarkable. We need to ensure that we continue that momentum in the community and never back down from impressing the skeptics. There is a community debt that we are still paying off and the Product team will need to factor that in when considering audiences who can't necessarily "hear" our message because of an existing conscious bias.
It is easy in a company with as much success as Microsoft to rest on laurels. Laurels will ultimately be a drug that impairs us and allows competitors to distrupt. We will need to work in awareness of this fact to help energize those who have become comfortable with the status quo.
Microsoft suffers from it's share of overbearing processes that ultimately harm products. Moving fast in an organization as big as this one requires us to become experts at prioritization. We need to aknolwedge that things will never move as fast as we want and be able to judiciously pick the right features, fixes and content to focus on to have the most impact with our products.
- Potential Target Audiences:
- Product Enginering
- Marketing
- Marcom (comms)
- Events
- Logistics
- Product marketing managers
- Product + Marketing == Stakeholders
- CDAs
- GAP (Gap being the GAP in customers that wont use us today because our products dont even remotely compete with AWS/google, and we need to fix experiences to attract them/compete, and sell less)
When looking at how we create and message great products, the Product team identifies three main areas of focus that define what will compose our overall strategy.
With over 400 products in Azure alone, it is critical that we align our voices across engineering, marketing and the CDA organization. The sheer breadth of the portfolio requries that we speak to developers with a consistant message. Whether in our documentation, our mailers, or the presentations we give at our First Party events; developers should hear a story that they can relate to and that ultimate conveys Microsoft's internal focus and commitment. Developers are desperate to know which direction is the "correct" one, and we should be crystal clear on ours.
The Product team has the unique opportunity to help drive product quality by helping to prioritize features and fixes. We do this by gathering and presenting evidence, not anecdotes. We work with the product teams, submitting PR's wherever possible and bearing the weight of engineering whenever it's possible for us to lighten their load.
Marketing is an expensive, yet incredibly powerful engine. The CDA Product team embraces marketing as a full partner in the product journey, providing their engine with first class content and helping to craft a message that is appealing without sacrificing it's technical integrity.
@EMILY/BRYAN: Not sure if we need these - it's kinda already been covered above but perhaps we can break out some of that into these sections?
* Trust
* Perception
* Talk about our history
* Talk about our change
* Relationships