Innovation to implementation, partners and customers are central to development
By Gavriella Schuster, General Manager, Worldwide Partner Group Microsoft on January 12, 2016
I often hear from partners that they admire Microsoft’s culture of innovation. And it’s true that we encourage experimentation and innovation at every level. But it recently occurred to me that partners may not realize what a key part they play in that development and growth, and I wanted to share with you your role – and the importance of it.
At Microsoft, continually refining and improving customer experience with our solutions is one of our highest priorities; it’s also one we couldn’t meet without input from our partner and customer community every step of the way.
You help us develop solutions, test innovations, identify and prioritize issues, and implement the new ideas that, in turn, drive overall customer satisfaction and consumption.
The Cycle of Innovation
In order to innovate and improve, we rely on your feedback. And lately, we’ve been able to implement meaningful changes faster than ever thanks to your outreach and responses through a powerful process I call the cycle of innovation.
Here’s how it works in our community:
Input and feedback from partners and customers come to us on a continual basis and through a wide range of channels and listening mechanisms. I know my team and I had a number of very useful conversations at the Worldwide Partner Conference, and Connect and our social channels like Twitter and Facebook are excellent year-round engagement platforms.
A prioritized engineering “One List” is built and reviewed regularly around the issues you help us identify and the ideas you have for new services capabilities.
To better understand the need and how we might implement changes, we build out guidance and support services and drive them to partners and MCS services through practice accelerators and KB articles. Your feedback helps us to iterate and refine.
Once we have enough experience in onsite service deliveries, we implement that guidance through FastTrack onboarding.
When possible, services are then automated for remote delivery with FastTrack.
When we feel like we have enough experience we will then integrate the new service into the customer experience as a new capability.
With the telemetry and focus we have on our cloud services, we are able to accelerate this cycle of innovation and continually improve the experience through both our FastTrack services as well as our online services much quicker than we have ever done before. From end to end, the entire process is driven to meet the needs of our customers and create a better experience for everyone.
Updated and transparent priorities
The pace of innovation is very fast, and we know partners like you need to know what we are working on in order to build out your own automation and IP accordingly. So to keep up with this cycle of innovation, we are committed to maintaining our services roadmaps, like our Office 365 and Cloud Platform roadmaps, which offer our partners insight into the capabilities we are prioritizing.
To drive an even better customer experience and build your businesses for sustained momentum as well, be sure to use these roadmaps and plan your own cycle of innovation in complementary areas.
We depend on your experience and expertise to help us continually improve our offerings. I encourage all our partners to take advantage of opportunities like WPC 2016, groups and discussions in Connect, and social media channels to share your thoughts and ideas with us.
Success in business is often tied to the ability to see an opportunity others have overlooked. What is diversity about? It’s about meeting the needs of our changing customers in a changing world.
I often hear from partners that they admire Microsoft’s culture of innovation. And it’s true that we encourage experimentation and innovation at every level.
