How Yammer Stayed Lean Post-Acquisition: Customer Development as Survival Strategy
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Transcript of How Yammer Stayed Lean Post-Acquisition: Customer Development as Survival Strategy
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How Yammer Stayed LeanPost-Acquisition
Customer Development as Survival Strategy
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I’ve worked most of my career in startups,but somehow I keep
working with enterprises:
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So here we were at Yammer,just working hard, y’know…
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…when this happened.
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We totally had an open mind.
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But the precedents weren’t great…
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What We Stood to Lose
• How we build product• How we make decisions• How we maintain culture
(Actually, keeping these below items was part of the acquisition deal.)
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How We Build Product: Problem First
• Product vision, not roadmap• Identify problem through:– Analytics data– Research– Customer suggestions (high degree
of skepticism)
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How We Build Product: Autonomy
• Goal: teams operate autonomously
• Goal: no unsolicited day-to-day manager approvals, opinions
• “Hire smart people, unblock obstacles, and trust them to get sh*t done”
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How We Build Product: Cross-Functional Teams
• Full cross-functional representation– Product Manager– Designers (visual & interaction)– Researcher– Data analyst– Tech Lead– Engineers
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How We Build Product: The 2-10 Model
• Scope it to 2-10 engineers, 2-10 weeks– If it’s bigger than that, it’s not MVP
• Best = fastest speed to learning
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How We Build Product: No “Experts”
• People assigned to different feature/product areas each time– Prevents silo-ing– Prevents territoriality / deferral to “the
search expert” or “the iOS expert”
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How We Make Decisions: Test Everything
• All features A/B tested• Goal is learning, not shipping– If it doesn’t move metrics, don’t ship
it–We ship ~50% of projects; if that
number gets higher, it means we’re not trying ambitious enough changes
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How We Make Decisions: Maximize Impact
• What % of users will this affect?• Can this change help people
without them needing to take explicit action?
• Will this change drive people to take the actions we want them to take?
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How We Maintain Culture: Systems Thinking
• “95% of the variance in productivity is due to the system, not the individual” – Deming– Is recruiting & hiring getting us the
candidates we need?– Is staffing projects keeping people
productive?– Is feature quality what we need?– Do people understand the mission
and their part in it?
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How We Maintain Culture: Manager as Servant Leader
• Managers don’t code/design/write specs
• Remove obstacles• Push people beyond their
comfort zone• Advise when asked• Provide higher-up view / vision
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How We Maintain Culture: Data, Not Opinions, Wins
• Kill the HiPPO• Quantitative data proves that a
problem exists, that a feature works
• Qualitative data reveals problems and opportunities, shows why a feature works/doesn’t
• ANYTHING can be put to a test!
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How We Maintain Culture: Clarity around ‘Culture Fit’
• “Product sense”• Ability to communicate
clearly / work openly• Problem-solving ability• Willingness to express dissent*• NOT “the best engineer” / “the
best designer”
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“Don’t pick your battles.Fight for everything.”
- Kris Gale, VP Engineering
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…though, apparently, just telling people “You’re doing it wrong” is not a successful
strategy.
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Acquisitionis a lot like
customer development!
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Form hypothesesState assumptions
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Hypothesis
We believe cloud services teams
are struggling with moving fast
enough and making data-
informed decisions and we can
help them by sharing what we’ve
learned.
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Assumptions
• Teams will tell us, “that’s just the way it’s done” and not listen
• Individuals will use bureaucracy to avoid change
• Teams are optimizing for “avoid mistakes” vs. “recover from mistakes”
• PMs/Research feels threatened that Data Analytics will obsolete them
• What kind of people stay at a company for 10+ years?
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Find the early adopters willing to listen to your beta
arguments
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Finding Early Adopters
• Posting on the MSFT Yammer network
• Redmond casual “Lean Day” – chairs and paper signs in an open space
• Visited people in their office, anyone who’d listen
• Volunteered to give talks through internal training group
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Share notes with your teamand update your
assumptions
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Updated Assumptions
• Individuals are reasonable, the bureaucracy is awful.
• The person who knows X is happy to help; their manager will be a bottleneck
• Teams are comfortable taking risks, they just need reassurance.
• People know their products aren’t good enough yet (but are eager to figure out how to get better)
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Stop doingthings that don’t work
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No.
• Too much “systems thinking” and theory
• “Minimum Viable Product”• Asking GMs for
help/resources/collaboration• Asking for behavioral change
without offering stepping stones• Long-term collaborations with
“traditional” teams• Yammer North
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Celebrate successes!
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Yes, more!
• “Borrow an analyst” for teams who wanted to explore A/B testing
• Research + Analytics talks• Dropbox integration (“take that,
OneDrive!”)• Spirit of the law, not letter of the
law • If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em
(and then covertly change their minds)
• Yammer Redmond