Video Transcript

Hello everyone. Back again yes back to back with Heather Newman community reporter here at ESPC19. I am here with Karuana Gatimu. Hello everyone really happy to be here. Thank You Heather for having me as always I appreciate it. Yeah absolutely great to see you great to be speaking with you and doing some cool stuff here and so Karuana and I were talking a few minutes ago and we’re in day four and how many presentations have you given? You did a lot here this week. I think I have two more left okay we have one together and then I have one more on what’s new Microsoft teams meeting and that will take it to six, six plus my evening events. So I’ve done seven sessions here. Wow. Yeah it is a lot but I really enjoy it you know Tracy I think the team was worried about me in terms of you know doing too much but I really enjoy this conference and I enjoy sharing things with people and teaching the subjects I really like to teach I did one on teamwork governance which was full to the gills and if you haven’t read those teamwork governance resources well you probably should but it was it was great you know I really enjoy doing the work here.

Yeah what when I saw that you brought to the table – this time – which you are doing more and more of is that you’ve got your general teams what’s new you’ve got your sort of general teams you know overall but then you’re digging deep into different sections yes the practicality of that is someone who is working with customers and and all of that like I love that you’re bringing that to the table – so you so a little bit like what else did you present us so we got that teams meetings yes we talked about teams meetings. You know I really like to do use cases and so when I’m talking about new app capabilities or when I’m talking about new features like private channels in the chat area our chats and conversations team provisioning things event nature I’m always talking about these features in the context of how they’re gonna work for an organization because bright shiny new features are beautiful yeah and you know I love them because I’m a geek at heart but if they’re not really serving a business process then for me they’re not as valuable as I think they can be. We also talked about learning pathways Microsoft 365 pathways which of course is our free training template that is available people can install in their own tendencies and configure and that’s a project that’s near and dear to my heart with this SharePoint engineering team and our Marvell team and it really represents a new way of Microsoft working together across the organization to deliver a really agile fun solution. So I get to talk about all those things. Yeah and something about that for those of you as a partner so I’m the CMO of content panda and so we are a learning pathways partner and the whole thing that Microsoft did with this and they do this with many products is that you were asked to be a part of an early adopter program so we were asked along with other folks that are here you know here story all’s and vitalist and many others yes and we all not only are early adopters but you know we I gotta say the coolest thing that we did was we all demoed to each other our products and it was cool for the first time I actually saw some people’s products. Oh yes I remember that meeting I remember that. And you really get to learn and you know something we’re all here trying to help people we of course there’s you know competition amongst people but you know at the end of the day what I really find amazing about it is how complimentary people’s services actually are. Everybody does something a little bit different in this space and you know what we’re providing we intentionally didn’t disrupt that business model we’re providing some basic content from support.office.com and from Docs that were streaming we’re building some scenarios and things of that nature but what what the partners provide is so much deeper and broader than that and we’re just a part of the puzzle and I like that I like the partnership that we’ve created together because at the end of the day it’s about digital literacy. If you think about it we haven’t really invested in employee digital literacy in quite some time not really we taught them a little bit about SharePoint maybe we taught them a little bit about power bi or Yammer or something but the last time we really made this effort was back when email became a thing and so how long has that been people it’s been a while I don’t think we’ve really been investing in digital literacy the way we need to. So now with the advent of Microsoft teams it really brings these issues like digital literacy or governance or employee experience it brings things really up to the fore that need to be addressed both from a technology perspective but like what you do from a user experience perspective and really helping people to get what’s going on. As a partner I really appreciate one being asked to the table what you know because that’s that’s great and knowing that they’re you know Microsoft does a lot but there are some gaps yes and that’s you know we do we fill those gaps and what I’ve really enjoyed about it is figuring out how we can take a product like content Panda and say okay this is what Microsoft’s put out and how can we you know leverage and make it something that our customers are going to use and say you know what you know use this or that it’s Oh No you’re using both. Yes and absolutely. So I’ve had that experience with our customers saying oh wow this is cool I can bring in you know this provision site and then with content Panda for example we you know make those all of it so that it’s in context you know in the story Elle’s gals story I love those girls like what they do with their videos is fantastic super cool and Gregg Headley who I used to work with an Avepoint he now works for Vitalist we were talking at Ignite and we were and I was like you know everybody sort of always told me that you’re a competitor we sat down and talked and we were like oh and so we’re doing demo swaps right when I get back right exactly cool. But the thing about that too is we’re intentionally not disrupting some of that business area because we’re not a learning management system right we’re not tracking which of your individual users are completing which one of the playlists that we have there’s lots of great partners to do that LMS 365 lots of other people who do this sort of work they’re here every year exactly they’re here right now and so we’re intentionally leaving that space for partners who already have that expertise what they don’t have is an ongoing stream of the updated content that’s coming from Microsoft that’s localized or going to be available in nine languages in the next quarter and then will go on from there you know this sort of thing is an overhead that Microsoft can and should be delivering as a part of product management. Yeah product management is not just about getting a feature to market, it’s also about driving the adoption of that if you think of agile service and product management it’s a much broader definition from a tax standpoint now and I like being a product manager and I you know I really enjoy it I always have I loved being a service manager when I was in IT and I really think they’re having that full end-to-end view of the technology is what makes a valuable experience and I’m always telling the IT pros that are out there now if you’re not having fun in this business if you’re not thinking more broadly in that way about how are you being a service manager a product manager of the services you’re delivering in your organization then you’re probably missing something and now is the time to become more strategic to become more influential from a technical perspective I mean this certainly you’ve done it I’ve done it it’s doable well.

And that’s sort of that that leads a bit into a couple of things that I wanted to ask you about so we’ve got you know one of the charters for a lot of companies is to do events right and also create you know Champions programs as well so two separate things that I want to talk about but the one the one that you talked a little bit about was with planner and also with teams like will you tell everybody about that yeah because I was like what. Yes it’s really it’s a fantastic thing so one of the one of the advantages of being in the team’s engineering group is that I’ve got to work with the product for three and a half years now. It’s really been pretty amazing and I’m an event producer I do all these sorts of events lots of things and I’ve always struggled with how to bring people together and manage tasks around events. But now I have teams and now I have the ability to create team templates and the work that we’re doing around these sorts of templates and pre configuring these sorts of templates and making them available to people is really going to be exciting and of course we also announced it ignite that we’re going to have a new tasks app inside of Microsoft teams and this app will bring together tasks from to do from planner from flagged emails and outlook along with individual tasks that you can enter there and you can then copy those tasks, you can there’s a there’s other capabilities that we’ll be announcing after the beginning of the year. So you can have this pre-configured team with an event management plan already built and then you can just replicate it over and over again. You don’t ever have to build that event management project plan again. I mean I might sing a little again because of this like give a little Prince. I was like I got tasks in like 15 places. Yes so the task coherence is an issue well then there’s that that’s just my life fatigue is my life coherence is something that’s happening from an engineering perspective inside of our organization and again it represents cross-organizational collaboration inside of Microsoft in service of a better user experience and if that’s not sought dis transformation cultural transformation I don’t know what is. It’s really amazing to be a part of Microsoft right now while these things are happening I feel so privileged and lucky to be working inside of teams and with all the people that I work with because of teams to see these experiences come to life and then to help people drive adoption of them.