Re-releasing Live Products

Amit Patil, Anshul Agarwal, Rory Madden at UXDX Community: Bengaluru. Video: https://youtu.be/lsiHWZ2i8U8

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introductions: LinkedIn Events and Outlook

[00:00:00] Rory: I'd like to get you to give a very quick introduction, and tell me about yourself but also the product that you work on. I'll start with Anshul.

[00:00:07] Anshul: Thank you, Rory, for welcoming us here tonight. I'm Anshul. I work with LinkedIn, and the primary products I work on these days are LinkedIn Events and also LinkedIn Groups. I have quite a few years of experience working in the user experience research domain. That is a short intro.

[00:00:30] Rory: Great, thank you. And over to you, Amit.

[00:00:38] Amit: Thanks, Anshul, and hi Rory, and hi everybody. It's really great to be here, and thank you for giving us the opportunity. I'm Amit Patil. I am senior design manager at Microsoft India, and I work on a very famous product that you all know of, which is Outlook: Outlook and related products to Outlook. And I also have a few years of experience, I would say.

[00:01:04] Rory: Great. That's perfect for what we're looking to talk about today. The topic is around pivoting enterprise products. A lot of the stuff that you read on the internet is all startup driven, and it's all about greenfield, brand-new products that you have a lot of flexibility with. But what we're going to dive into today is, when you're dealing in an enterprise domain, how do you handle all of that insight that you're gathering, and the pivoting that you might need to do? With that kind of an introduction: Anshul, you mentioned you work with LinkedIn Events. How does LinkedIn Events fit in within the broader LinkedIn product suite?

[00:01:48] Anshul: That's a great question, Rory. The very foundation of LinkedIn is that it helps people build great relationships with each other. When we talk about events, we are talking about three kinds of personas, or audiences if you will. One is an organizer, like yourself. The others are speakers, like me and Amit. The third are the audiences, the attendees, like the people who are listening to this talk right now. We aim to build relationships between these three groups of people.

[00:02:24] When we started LinkedIn Events, the idea was that when people meet face to face (this was before COVID), they interact with each other and a lot of the time they connect with each other afterwards on LinkedIn, and they get into a conversation. Sometimes these conversations lead to job prospects or career opportunities like mentorship. When COVID happened and we moved into the online space, the idea of LinkedIn Events was to provide people that space to take conversations forward. The thing we are aiming to achieve is to help people connect with each other and build professional relationships. That's where we fit into the bigger picture of LinkedIn.

[00:03:16] Rory: Okay, so it's the same connections. It started with offline connection building, but now it's shifting to online, like everything is.

[00:03:26] Anshul: Exactly.

[00:03:26] Rory: Perfect. And Amit, can you talk a bit about how Outlook, well, it's pretty well known, but how does it fit into the broader picture? Is it a product in its own right, or do you think of it as part of a suite?

Bookings as a separate product

[00:03:41] Amit: I would say it's part of a bigger suite, and we all have used Outlook at different points of time. But within the umbrella of Outlook there are these smaller products, and one particular product is Bookings. Bookings is particularly for booking time, just like other competitors like Calendly and so on: to book the time of an individual or for a service. Outlook as an umbrella, I would say, has so many features that some of the features need to be specialized, and that's where something like Bookings comes into the picture, which focuses primarily on booking services and times. We moved from small and medium enterprises to bigger enterprises as a whole, and it's of course part of the M365 suite that it's sold with.

[00:04:33] Rory: Okay, great. This Bookings product sounds interesting. It's one that I'm not very familiar with. Outlook, yes; Bookings, not so much. Can you describe how this came about, describe in a little bit more detail what it is, and why it's separate? Because it sounds to me like it's just a calendar feature.

[00:04:53] Amit: That's an interesting question. If I were to describe Bookings in a quick manner, it's not just about personal time booking, but also making sure that services are booked. I can take an example: your hospital, and you want your doctor's time to be booked at a particular time. But a particular doctor comes with his services, right? There is a nurse around, and there are other things around that play in. So Bookings is about booking that service, and you actually give a public-facing web page, and a controller. I should mention there are multiple parties within Bookings: there is your admin, then there is the one who books the page, and there are the people who actually perform services. That's the triangle of Bookings.

[00:05:48] Why is it a separate product? It's a separate product because we saw the need. In fact, we have seen this in COVID times, particularly booking for, say, COVID tests and so on. We are seeing more and more Bookings being used.

[00:06:03] Rory: And how do you make the decision internally? Obviously I'm simplifying here, but could that not just be a feature in Outlook? You have calendar in Outlook. How do you make the decision, from an enterprise perspective, to say this is going to be a new product we're going to call Bookings, versus this is a feature that we're just going to put in the calendar in Outlook?

[00:06:29] Amit: I think the idea is when specialized cases come in. Outlook is used by millions of users out there, so you cannot try and push everything into that feature space, because in the end all the features are fighting with each other to be there, while a certain set of users need those specialized features. That's where a product like Bookings is born, where it needs to be standing independently, as against just doing it within Outlook itself.

[00:07:00] I would say the way to look at it is, again, Microsoft has a culture of hackathons. That's where a product like Bookings was born, and hacks actually help you identify whether it works in the market. But we have a big responsibility when we have a product which has legacy, and you cannot just put another new feature out there. By pivoting it out as an extra product by itself, we actually help test out those scenarios as a pilot outside. I think that's the intention. Even if you start with a hack, it's a safer way to look at the market and test it out, and we are seeing its success now; more and more people want to use it. That's another way of looking at it.

[00:07:48] Rory: Great. Just something that popped into my head there: it sounds similar to Google. They're famous for launching lots of little mini products and spinning them off, but they're also quite famous for periodically shutting them down. Is there a benefit, from an enterprise perspective, which is more established and has a bit more trust? What's the risk of Microsoft suddenly saying this isn't working? Let me rephrase that: what are your goals that make sure this product is going to be successful?

[00:08:28] Amit: I would say, from a user goal perspective, it's making sure that the specific audience is getting its due by getting their own product separately. From a business goal perspective, yes, it's part of the suite, so if that audience is served, the suite makes more meaning to that audience as well, other than the regular audience who's already there. I think the intention is to make sure that a certain set of audiences also get their due. At the same time, I would say that, again, it's a business in the end: how do we increase the business opportunities through making these unique products?

[00:09:15] As far as shutting down is concerned, I would say it's not much of a concern, because if you are getting a good set of users who are actually being served, then shutting down is not really an option. Otherwise, if we were really looking at shutting it down, we might as well integrate it in the main product. I wouldn't comment about other companies, but I think that's not what Microsoft believes.

Pivoting LinkedIn Events online during COVID

[00:09:39] Rory: Right, thanks for that. Jumping back over to Anshul: you mentioned you went through a change. LinkedIn Events used to be for physical events, and then, as everybody knows, everything's remote nowadays. Can you describe how that pivot happened? Who decided, and how did you decide to make that pivot?

[00:10:03] Anshul: The initial idea when LinkedIn Events got conceptualized was helping people take their offline conversations forward by using the online LinkedIn platform. Then COVID happened, and people started cancelling their events, and postponements started happening. A couple of months, or three or four months, into the situation, events started converting to online. Not the super big conferences; here we were talking about sole proprietors hosting these events, or small companies without a lot of employees. That was when we had to hasten the roadmap. It was always part of the roadmap that we would want to move eventually to online, but this provided us that window of opportunity to make the transition swiftly.

[00:11:03] Now, when we talk about moving the whole framework online, and how we do that quickly, that's where I can speak to how research helped specifically. We saw that users' behaviors were constantly changing. It's not that they changed once over the period of COVID itself; every two months we saw a shift. Things which were more important to people were no longer important, and some new things came into the picture. For example, we had learned that earlier people used to attend events to network a lot. However, the networking opportunities just diminished in the online space. Organizers did not know how to provide that space, and attendees did not know how to go about it. So we saw that the focus shifted to learning, instead of meeting people and talking to each other.

[00:12:00] This is one example; a lot of similar behaviors surfaced, which helped us make tweaks to our event page: what the organizer creates, what the attendee sees. And we were able to do that. Also, the whole point of my talk was around formative sprints. We ran these sprints on a biweekly basis, which helped incrementally improve the design rather quickly. That is how we pivoted quickly. Research definitely contributed a lot, besides exec decisions.

[00:12:41] Rory: Enterprises can sometimes get a name for, "We've signed something off, and it took so long to sign off that we just keep going with it." Was there much pushback when you started coming back with this research, saying, "Listen, these customer behaviors are changing, we need to change our roadmap"?

[00:13:03] Anshul: I think there are always two parts to the equation when we talk about research, because research provides you with a lot of insights. Any researcher would agree that we cannot always expect all of them to go into production. However, there is always room to prioritize and align insights based on company priorities, so we made sure that we did that. What is most important, what keeps on repeating itself in multiple studies, should be a P0, and we continued pushing for it for the product roadmap. And I would say the execs are very welcoming to such insights, which are repeated and are heard across.

Promoting a sub-product within a larger suite

[00:13:51] Rory: Great. I'm going to shift it slightly. We talked about the pivot, but now I want to ask about this: we've established that for both of you it's a smaller product within a larger product suite. I don't know the full internals, but I know with Office 365, for example, there are a lot of small products; with LinkedIn I'm not as sure. How do you promote your sub-product, if I can call it that, within the larger suite? How do you go about doing that, and are there any challenges with other sub-products trying to get the user's attention? I'll start with Anshul on that one.

[00:14:32] Anshul: When you say promoting, do you mean promoting internally, how do we promote our product?

[00:14:40] Rory: From an end user's perspective. I use LinkedIn, and because I'm in the events industry I know about LinkedIn Events, but I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who are just learning about it for the first time. How do you try to promote LinkedIn Events, when LinkedIn are probably trying to promote a lot of things to the users?

[00:14:57] Anshul: That's a great question, Rory. About the promotions, I wouldn't be the best person to provide you the full spectrum of the view here. All I can say is there are marketing teams which look specifically into promotion. My area of expertise would lie more towards how we get events discovered by both organizers and attendees. Like with any tool, there are multiple entry points to events. If you go to your LinkedIn page today, the quickest way would be the left panel, where you see your profile picture, and there are ways it can be discovered in the feed, from the search bar, et cetera. We make sure that it keeps getting discovered, because one of the true norths for us is to increase conversions. That would be true for any product: more people using it. So that is definitely something we try to push for.

[00:16:05] Rory: Is there a lot of competition for getting a link on that left sidebar? Were there any challenges getting that, or is it just that events is such a high priority for the company?

[00:16:15] Anshul: It is a priority for sure, given the times that are changing. Unfortunately COVID is not a great time, but for some companies it has definitely resulted in improvements and provided that window of opportunity. I would say LinkedIn Events definitely fits, and it is the case with a lot of online hosting platforms, like Zoom or Teams, where we saw a good turnaround. There is competition, and internal alignment is sought, but these are exec decisions; I wouldn't have a ton of view into that.

[00:16:59] Rory: On that note, I'll pass it over to Amit. The same question: Bookings is obviously one of the smaller products in the Office 365 suite. How do you try to surface it, and are you competing against other products for users' attention?

Jobs to be done and a symbiotic relationship

[00:17:17] Amit: I would say internally, yes. Again, when you're talking about the suite, you always have the challenge of the user wanting to use one set of products in one part of their day, as against the other. I think the way to look at it is: what slice of the user's time are we focusing on? Because in the end you can't assume that the user is going to use only your product all the time. Looking at it competitively is one way of looking at it, but the other way of looking at it is: how are we switching over between products at the right time? So the user is not asking, "Should I use this or this?" But when the right job comes into the picture, if you go by the Jobs to be Done framework, which product is supporting that job within your suite? And it might be that out of those 20 products you offer in the suite, none of them offer anything else for it.

[00:18:23] The way we approach it is to look at the jobs which are satisfied by this product and which are not satisfied by the other products. And of course there is internal, like you asked Anshul, who would go on the left rail. These are business decisions, and they are also decisions on the basis of usage. In the end, I cannot remove Outlook from the top 10 and give you Bookings instead. I cannot remove Word, Excel and PowerPoint and give you Bookings in the start, because that would really underserve that particular product and overserve this one.

[00:19:03] It's more about knowing where you fit in within the suite, and knowing where you fit in within the user's life. I think that's most important. If you're just trying to get elbow room, pushing each other, "Hey, I need to sit in here, I need to sit in there", that is not really healthy competition. The healthy competition is: where do you fit in? And if you fit in well, then who are your colleagues around the product suite? For Bookings, Outlook is a big colleague. People will set something up on Bookings but get their emails in Outlook. Say, for example, you set up a Bookings page for events, and some customer clicks on a particular event. I will get my email as a confirmation, and hence I will be in Outlook; I will not go to Bookings for that. But for setting up and making those changes, I'll still go to Bookings.

[00:19:55] That's where you need to be, in what's the scientific term, a symbiotic relationship, rather than "I am standing out, unique." And the same goes externally as well. One way of looking at competition is, "I'm competing with all the other products in the world." The other is, "Where do we fit in with the other products in the world?" Some people use, say, Gmail in their personal space but at the same time use Outlook in the office space. So where do we fit in? That's what we need to figure out.

Customers versus users in B2B

[00:20:29] Rory: Great, I really like that. I'm a big fan of Jobs to be Done, so I like looking at the user problems and jobs that they're trying to achieve. But that brings me to a question about B2B software, because, and you brought this up in your talk, there is often a difference between the customer and the user in B2B products. Very quickly: the customer tends to be the person who pays for it, and the user is the person who uses it. If the customer is paying for it, do you need to focus more on solving their needs? Why would you bother focusing on what the user's needs are? I'll start with Amit on that one.

[00:21:09] Amit: This is an interesting debate, and I'm sure most people in their own companies have this debate. From the business side, they want to talk to the customers; from the user research side, people can't help saying that the user comes first. I would say both needs are important. In my talk I also mentioned that the org needs are important and the user needs are also important. Of course, the misunderstanding that user equals customer is the problem. We should not think that both are the same, and that's where we need to draw the difference. I would rather say it's a scale across different personas who affect your user experience. Organizations also have their needs which need to be satisfied, and the customers will be telling you about the org needs, while the users also have their needs in using their day-to-day software, and we need to understand those as well.

[00:22:07] As an enterprise product, if you're focusing only on user needs or only on customer needs, you're going to fall short on a lot of things. In the end there's the IT admin. If you look at just the organizational needs, IT admins enable a lot of features; IT admins are empowered to enable those features. Now, if you're not understanding why or when they are enabling those features, we are not really helping the organization, and not even helping the user, because the user doesn't even get that product to use. So how do we inform the customer, or the org side of things, in a manner where they see the value prop and hence enable it for the users?

[00:22:56] On the other side, even if you enable the products, there's this problem with enterprise products of wanting to push the product: you just bought it and now you have to use it. The challenge I'm seeing there is that the user is at the mercy of the company and whatever they bought within their budget. That's where the user need comes into the picture: is your product really understanding the user's needs? Because they are not empowered to choose, but they are empowered to react back, to increase the usage or not increase the usage and so on. So I think both are important; we just need to balance the two. I see it as a spectrum, rather than isolated user and customer research.

[00:23:40] Rory: And that's the challenge of product management, trying to get that balance correct. A last question to you, Anshul, because I'm a little confused with LinkedIn Events: do you have that separation between the customer paying and the user who's using it?

[00:23:56] Anshul: That's a great question, and something I continue checking with my team as well. When it comes to one party paying and another not paying, we do not have that; LinkedIn Events is free for now. When we talk about segregation of customers, in terms of one party buying this and someone else using it, that could be there in the case of enterprises who use LinkedIn Events to go live. However, when it comes to prioritizing who we focus on, customers or users, I think at this point in time we really want to provide both of these parties a safe space to build those relationships with each other.

[00:24:48] And why LinkedIn is the best-suited tool for that is because when you host professional events, you want your professional network to see them, so relevant people can join: people who are in the same industry, like-minded people who are looking to learn from the content you have to share. It goes both ways. The attendee as well may want to know about the events being hosted by, say, brand names or people they really look up to in their industry. We focus on providing the best experiences to both the organizer and the attendee, and we want the process to be simplified.

[00:25:33] There is just so much which goes into creating an event; you would know, you are an event organizer. This is just one part of it, during the event; we are live right now. But a lot has gone into logistics before this event. You probably compiled a list of who to invite, and you probably reached out to a ton of speakers, and we were a few of the shortlisted ones. Some things will also happen after this event is over. There will be some communication from your end. Some of the attendees would want to connect with Amit, with me, with other speakers of this event, and they may want to connect with each other as well, all of this towards advancing career opportunities and knowing more about the domain they are in or are interested in.

[00:26:20] Like I said, there is a lot happening here, and when COVID started, no single platform had cracked all of this seamlessly. It was still a challenging process to create an event, and to discover events you would want to attend professionally on the topic you are interested in. Right now our focus is to provide that seamless experience by integrating the various native tools and data solutions that we have, and people are not earning any money from it.

[00:26:55] Rory: But you did say it's free for now. Is that a strategy for the future, or is that something that's just up in the air?

[00:27:04] Anshul: I wouldn't know, but I know the state of things right now: you can go live for the next event.

Enterprise versus startup: trust and speed

[00:27:14] Rory: Great, I'll have a look at it. Just to bring it back to the pivoting bit of the conversation: is it easier to build and pivot a product in an enterprise setting, or do you think it's easier in a startup, where I guess there's less bureaucracy and overhead? Anshul, do you want to take it?

[00:27:40] Anshul: I think both have their pros and cons. When we talk about startups, one thing they can afford to do is disrupt. They believe in making things quickly, failing, and learning from their failures. A lot of startups in the online events space are becoming very popular these days, a lot of audio platforms as well. However, when we talk about an established organization like Microsoft or LinkedIn, we have a set of values which we stick to. LinkedIn is a part of Microsoft, and the first thing is of course trust. We cannot take chances on that trust piece. We cannot disrupt; we have to stay true to whatever members want from us and look up to us for.

[00:28:38] We are very deliberate in the features that we ship, because we do not want anything to seem like spam. Or when people go live, we have to make sure that the right content is being projected into the market: what are they going live about? That's a little example, but our foundations are very strong and we all live by that. When it comes to "easier to ship", I would say the things which are in priority, which are super important for users, which are prominent user needs, will always find room to be shipped. But the way we operate versus the way startups operate is going to be different.

[00:29:20] Rory: And is there a challenge in that? The trust is huge, because an enterprise has already built that trust. But is it a little bit of handcuffs on moving fast, because you can't experiment as much as you might like to? Or do you think it's a good thing, because you just have that trust already?

[00:29:44] Anshul: There is always a mindset to seize the opportunity, and there is a push to move fast. However, given how big organizations are, and given the collaboration that happens between multiple teams, when we even talk about some feature change on LinkedIn, the feed team would probably need to have a look at it, and there are these multiple teams in any organization. So moving fast is always a challenge. We try to find that little balance, and the focus is always on meeting user expectations with what can be launched.

[00:30:33] Rory: Great, that sounds really good. Amit, do you have anything to add on that?

[00:30:42] Amit: No, I think Anshul actually covered all the points, but I would just say that that is correct. In the end there are the values, and there are so many users out there who are making a product part of their lives day in, day out. It's not just using it as a side item. For example, in Anshul's case it's a live event going on, or in Microsoft Outlook's case, you are doing your day-to-day business on the same platform. Any kind of experiment has to be well thought through, because a service like that going down could mean jobs being lost, in today's world, or even somebody could die because of it. It's a very critical space in that sense, and we have a lot of responsibility on our shoulders.

[00:31:39] That's why the decisions are made in that fashion. We could always push thousands of features out there, and people would be happy to use them for 15 days. But what we really value is not just going for growth; we value the retention of existing users, we value the people who have already trusted us, and how we make sure that continues. That doesn't mean don't innovate. COVID has taught us we need to innovate, we need to jump quickly, and I think software companies were the ones who could adapt quickly.

[00:32:08] A hackathon is a practice within Microsoft where people tend to hack and suggest new features. That's a culture in itself, which enables the engineers, designers, all the product teams and PMs, all the makers, to showcase those unique opportunities which perhaps got missed out. That's where it starts. I would say it's not that innovation doesn't happen; it's just that we have to be a little conscious of the existing audience, and we cannot ignore them.

Championing the user's voice

[00:32:52] Rory: Great. Touching on that, because both of you have actually managed to pivot products, or shift things around, in an enterprise setting: do you have any tips for how you would champion a user's voice? You found some insights from some research, and now you want to go and champion that in the wider organization, to try to get them to pivot or change your products to enable solving that customer problem. Amit, do you have any tips you could share with people?

[00:33:25] Amit: I would say, I think in the US there's the word called lobbying. That's very important, where you actually need to get your whole triad on board. We have a strong triad culture in Microsoft, and by triad I mean the PM, design and research, and the dev. Because in the end, when you all get together, that's when a product is formed. You cannot say design is at the top, you cannot say PM is at the top, you cannot say dev is at the top. In the end, it's the cohesive nature, the collaborative nature, by which we can produce products.

[00:33:57] What's worked for me so far, and what I've seen in bigger organizations, is actually getting buy-in from these stakeholders, the members of the triad. You have a new idea: first of all, speak about your idea. Don't keep your idea to yourself. Gone are the days when you're like, "Hey, this is my idea, and I'm going to hatch the egg by sitting on it." That's not how it works. You actually need to sit with your triad, open up the idea, add more to the idea, and get buy-in. When you actually have all three of you presenting together, the strength of that idea from the PM side, from the dev side, from the design side, is so powerful. That's almost like a mini business case that you're presenting to anybody, be it leadership or within your team. I think that's where the chances of it sustaining are much higher. So I would say lobbying, or buying in: talking to the right people, creating that subgroup, and making the group as diverse as possible. That's very important. That's my tip.

[00:34:59] Rory: That's pretty good. Anshul, do you have anything to add?

[00:35:02] Anshul: A lot along the lines of what Amit mentioned. I'm not talking in particular about one particular idea that you have to push through, but in general about all the research insights that there are, and how we make sure they get implemented. Instead of lobbying, I would use the word socializing. We try to socialize it as much as possible with our stakeholders, with whoever we work with. A lot of the time these insights can be triangulated by multiple user stories that are coming in, by the voice of the member; there are multiple channels to gather these inputs. We keep building upon that, and we try to find areas where we can continue pushing them. There could be newsletters, there could be weekly meetings, there could be quarterly things happening, and those provide very nice opportunities for these insights to be heard by a lot of ears.

[00:36:13] That certainly helps. When you keep repeating it, like a parrot saying the same thing again and again, "We have to do this, this is something which keeps coming up again and again, verified by multiple sources", those things definitely get in.

[00:36:28] Rory: There's a great quote: when you're tired of saying it, that's when people are finally starting to hear it.

[00:36:35] Anshul: That is true.

[00:36:35] Rory: Great. I think that brings us to the end. I've been keeping an eye on the questions; nobody has sent in any questions yet, but maybe they were too enthralled in the conversation. Please do send in any questions you have. Anshul and Amit will be around, and they can answer those questions on Slack, so please do send them in if you have them. But for now, I'd like to thank Anshul and Amit for both giving their talks last night and sharing their insights today. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you very much.