Windows Live Wave 3 Planning Memo (August 2007) — Part 2

When Microsoft began rolling out its primarily consumer-focused Windows Live service line-up, there seemed to be little rhyme or reason to the company’s plans. Enter Chris Jones, Corporate Vice President of Windows Live Experience. In 2007, Jones, along with colleagues David Treadwell, Corporate Vice President of Live Platform Services, and Brian Arbogast, Corporate Vice President of Mobile Services, began trying to bring some discipline and regimentation to the Windows Live development effort.

In the summer of 2007, that gang of three issued a Windows Live Wave 3 planning document that
demonstrated just how much they planned to change the modus operandi of the Windows Live team. The thinking: Theme planning, milestones, vision checkpoints, and other Windows-like conventions, if successfully implemented, will make Windows Live services more predictable and reliable. (The addition of these more rigorous quality gates also risk slowing the Windows Live development pace, however.) Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see if and when Microsoft ends up acquiring Yahoo — or even if its acquisition bid ends up a distraction more than a reality — how these milestones and policies are impacted.

The internal Live Wave 3 Planning Memo Part 1 is here.  What follows is Part 2.

Delivering High Quality Connections

What are the new creative ways to drive connections to our services, other services, or merchants? Most people agree that the ideal is experiences that are relevant to the customer and drive theright traffic to the referee.  The specific things we’d consider include:

* What features will we design that drive more traffic across the network?

o To MSN
o To Search instant answers, etc.
o To advertisers or other merchants

* What features create new opportunities for merchants or delivery of value added services?

o Photo printing, events, affinity groups, lists

* For display advertising, how do we improve and target?  How do we manage the experience for customers (prevent irrelevant ads)? 

o How do we avoid “selling all the inventory at any price?”  This is the channel 35 late night TV example
o How do we create an experience that allows for the systematic collection of customer data about their location, preferences and interests that can be fed to the ad platform for better targeting which results in better quality of ads and increased yield.  This extends to having them add more information about their contacts and driving up the attributes per contact metric is currently low implying good breadth but not enough depth.

* How do we track and measure effectiveness?  How do we improve based on what we know?
* How does education and x-sell work in tandem? What is our SEO strategy for the suite, and itscomponents?
* How do our products (and specifically our user-generated content) effectively show up in our search results without violating user trust?
* Cross team – AdCenter

First Class Mobile Experience

* How do we create a compelling end to end mobile experience for users whose mobile device is their primary access point to the internet? (Particularly pertinent to certain markets such as China and Japan).
* How can we use mobile features to drive engagement with our services in the PC? And vice versa?
* How do we balance the need to reach every mobile user with the depth of experience with more capable phones?
* Phone number as a Live ID, phone number for SMS reset
* SMS, MMS, VOIP interop
* Contact roaming
* Taxonomy of mobile devices
* Onboarding and promotion
* Relationship with mobile client software team
* Messenger to mobile interop
* Relationship with network operators
* Can /should we do anything for location based services?
* What is our monetization strategy and role of our partners and how does that differ by market specially where online advertising is not as well developed but mobile use is increasing POP, IMAP, and other standards for connecting to non-Windows Mobile devices
* Cross team – Windows Mobile, Mobile Platform

Keeping in Touch with People

* What’s the list of contacts for any person?  How do contacts, buddies, friends, history of who I’ve communicated to all relate?
* What’s the taxonomy of ID to contact card to “extended contact card” to browse page to website?
* “Browse page” and “personal website” separation.  How do we separate the “browse page” (my view of your stuff) from your authored experience (personal website)?
* What is our model for groups?  What is a group, how does it relate to a distribution list (DL) and security group?  What is our taxonomy for personal groups (people in my contact list), shared groups (groups with membership visible to the members), and public groups?

o This includes roles (owner, contributor, etc), definition (does a group always have a space?  Does it have presence?), and platform (where are they stored, how are they shared)?

* What are the “1st party” experiences on our platform?  Who is the target audience and how do we measure success?

o Are we a blogging site, and how do we position relative to the competition?  Same with photo sharing or social networking.

* What is our approach to family scenarios?  How do I “administer” my family, share with family?  Is it a group?
* How do we enable basic sharing across home/work?
* How do we make it easy to solicit advice from your contacts, groups, whole WL network?

o How do we leverage all the ad hoc communication in our network to populate suggestions to users?
o Lists as first class things to share – should we invest?
o How can we best leverage content in ad hoc communication from IM and Mail to generate suggestions from your friends, etc?

* How can we expand/enhance the gleam concept to better surface user updates to others? How do we make sure users understand the gleam’s meaning and usefulness? How can we provide more granular detail via the gleam (or some evolution of it) with the least number of clicks/work as possible?
* What is the role of location based services in the context of social networking and keeping in touch with people?
* What is the plan to elevate contacts and presence across the network?

o How do we “aggregate” views of the people on other social networks into WL?
o What is our plan to extend beyond Live IDs to phone numbers and email addresses on a person’s contact list?
o What personalization do we provide to the communication recipient to decide what method they would like to receive (e.g. I prefer IM, Mail, SMS)?
o Do we provide a people directory on the network? How do we facilitate making new connections without becoming intrusive?

* Do we enable affinity networks (AARP, Boy Scouts, etc)?  If so, how?
* What’s the developer model for extending this experience?
* Cross team – ABCH, Messenger back end, XBox Live
* Deeping Our Relationship With Customers
* Lowering the barrier to entry
* One view of profile
* Encouraging use of more services
* Shifting from secondary to primary usage.  In each service, we have customers who have different levels of engagement.  How can we know, for each customer, whether they are primary or secondary on any service?  What features would we add to encourage deeper engagement? 
* Monitoring abuse and rewarding loyalty.  Another opportunity is preventing abuse on our system. Today people can sign up for free email accounts and then use these to send SPAM.  They can sign up for 30 SkyDrive’s and abuse our storage terms.  How do we know if a customer is abusing the system? Are there places we require deeper engagement or knowledge to use more of our services?  For example, should we offer 5GB of free storage but after 1GB is used require a phone number or other validation?  How do we balance this abuse monitoring with our desire to increase sign ups?
* Attracting customers to our services from our client experiences.  Our Windows-based suite of applications provides an opportunity for us to promote and encourage usage of our services.  For email, is there a “one click” way to migrate client settings to the service and roam them?  How does the experience within WL Mail get visibly better if a customer uses a WL Hotmail account?  In photos, do we have “one photo collection” which is stored with your LiveID that includes settings (like user name/password) from all sites you’ve published to?  In Live Writer,  do we make it easy to “keep track” of your blogs/comments on Live once you’ve used writer to publish to a blog?  We can attract customers with our best of breed support for standards and then encourage usage of our services.  In this theme we should consider ways to instrument and measure our success.
* What is our taxonomy and shared investment for “knowing more” about customers?  For each service, we should know if someone has not used, is a primary customer, or a secondary customer.  How do we improve this?  What’s the platform?

o Moving from secondary to primary
o Moving from visitor to author
o Pre-provisioning services
o Aggregating information

* How do we lower the barrier to entry?  What is the evolution of our experience for onboarding, sign in, sign up?
* How can we use Windows Messenger to encourage more adoption of our services – through notifications, recommendations, or other features?
* What’s the invitation model to join Windows Live?  (lowering friction)
* How do we help customers manage their personal information?
* How do I manage my “online persona”?  This should include home/work, home/gamer, and multiple IDs?  How does this relate to sharing, groups, and presence?

o Messenger – do I have one logon and presence for each ID?
o Spaces – do I have multiple spaces, one for each persona, with different permissions?  Or do I have one space with different views?
o Home/work – what if my work life is run outside of Windows Live?  How do we “link up” in the user experience?
o What are the implications for linked IDs, profiles?

* How do we know which devices and services are associated with an account?
* How do we enable migration from other services?  What is the flow and which scenarios are important?  How do we integrate compelling features that “pull” them into our service and entice them to migrate?
* What’s the relationship between your account and the rest of your Microsoft relationships (billing, newsletter communications, Xbox, etc)?
* Cross team — IDS, billing, Office Live small biz, advertising/adcenter
* Wiki Everywhere
* Community as editors
* Everything “editable” by everyone
* Defaults, implications, assume data
* Getting to Your Information Anywhere
* For each type of information (mail, calendar, files, photos, folders):

o What steps will we take to deliver for files what we have done with mail?  One view of all my information, on all my devices, from any device?
o How will we help customers aggregate their information across devices and access it on any device?  (e.g. POP aggregation, storing LiveWriter blogs, etc)

* For files/folders:

o How does our platform evolve to move beyond files to photos?
o How does the Windows Live experience improve when you add Office Live workspaces?  How is our combined offer superior to competitive offers (like Google docs/spreadsheets)?
o What is the namespace (both from the cloud and on a device) for files, folders?

* For social networks:

o Aggregating social networks – what’s our model?  How do we “aggregate” from other social networks and learn more about customers?  What do we enable customers to “project” into another social network and what do we allow them to “track” from ours?  Take Facebook, QQ, MySpace as examples

o Specific focus on Messenger as a “presence” platform – how do we make Messenger “the essential horizontal IM and presence platform for all social networks, with best experience on Windows Live”?

* Lists as first class things to share – should we invest?

o How do we enable community-generated content through rating and voting (to create aggregated lists like listible.com or 43Things.com)

* How do we bridge home and work environments?

o exchange interop
o running domains for small business, EDU, etc

* How do I manage my devices – which data where?
* What quotas do we have and how they are managed?
* What is the 3rd party opportunity:

o For connecting to information on Windows Live (publish photos onto a different social networking site)
o For putting information into Windows Live (adding photos to the aggregate customer view of “their stuff”)

* Cross team – WLC, Office Live, LPS Storage
* Securing the PC and Web Experience
* How do we take a leadership position in SPAM?

o How much of the SPAM problem is about giving customers easy management of gray mail? (inbox cleanup tool that helps unsubscribe to unwanted newsletters with a few clicks)
o How do we move to being competitive in terms email deliverability by offering tools, information and options to legitimate large and small senders (so they stop telling customers to not use Hotmail –some of them have done that in the past)

* What’s the next level of investment in phishing?
* How do we move beyond SPAM to reputation-based services?  Malware, IP reputation
* What is the experience when customers “update” to OneCare?
* How does our work improve (and naturally extend) the Windows and IE experiences?
* Should we increase investment in the administrative role?  How can we improve the experience for the “family administrator” or “custom domain administrator”? 
* What is our platform offering for Microsoft?  For the industry?  How do we enable solutions in the enterprise?
* Cross team – OneCare, ForeFront
Always Running Data Center
* Quality of service, benchmarked with top competitors
* Beta environment
* QOS reviews and focus
* Back end/front end collaboration
* Bridging Home and Work
* Calendar sharing
* Email
* Small biz and enterprise
* Enlisting the Army
* Partners
* Developers
* Community contributors

THEME OWNERS

Each theme will have a leader (generally a GPM and/or PUM), a product planner, and, in most cases, a design lead.  The leaders will pull together a virtual team responsible for refining and scoping the themes, and will produce a presentation and a high-fidelity click through prototype for each theme. 

The leader will coordinate the investigation of each theme, working with product planning, product management, design, development, testing, and other discipline leaders.  They will work across dependent teams as they are writing their drafts and make sure that scenarios or features that span teams are covered end to end.  They will outline the proposed scenarios and customer promise.  We expect to hold these theme checkpoint meetings in late October with the these leaders and members of their virtual teams…..

(Note: I removed the list of project owners’ names here.)

Schedule

Below is the detailed planning schedule, including owners, next steps, and deliverables

8/31/2007: Planning Memo/ Outlines themes and bets/ Chris Jones, David Treadwell

8/31/2007: Engineering Memo/ Outlines engineering framework for Windows Live Experience teams/    Steve Liffick, Arthur DeHaan

September/October: Theme Planning/ Teams take planning memo, plan their work/ PM leaders, productplanning, product management/ Ship Wave 2

September/ October: MQ Planning/ Prioritized list of MQ deliverables, MQ entry/exit criteria Dev and test managers with GPMs/ Begin MQ feature list and prioritization

October: Theme Checkpoint/ Includes prioritized list of scenarios, PPT, and click-through prototype. Scoped planning themes inform vision document, direction for feature teamsPM leaders, productplanning, product management

November: MQ  & feature team planning begins/ MQ work begins/ Dev and test managers with GPMs  Focus on MQ

November: Team Planning/ Teams take refined themes, continue to plan their work/ PM leaders/    Planning within feature teams, cross team dependencies included, early spec writing begins

Early December: Vision Checkpoint/ Teams review plans to support scoped themes, outline proposed feature team investments/ GPMs and/or PUMs

December: Vision Document/ Outlines pillars for release, describes team commitment/ Chris Jones, David Treadwell, Brian Arbogast

December/January: Team Planning/ Teams refine plans based on vision document, including M1 commitments/ GPMs and/or PUMs/ Planning within feature teams, spec writing for M1 continues

Q1 2008: M1 Entry/ MQ complete, enter M1/ All feature teams/ Begin M1 coding