Story book format slide deck on customer driven engineering by a Product Manager on the Microsoft Mixed Reality (HoloLens) team.

1. Ben Corn, PM @ Microsoft Mixed Reality
Customer Driven
Engineering (in 50 slides)

2. Problem
Identification

3. What problem are we trying to solve
for our customers?

4. Is there data indicating this is a
problem?

5. Does solving this problem still provide
a cohesive product experience
with a clear value proposition?

6. Does solving this problem help grow
our product? Dollars don’t care
where they came from.

7. Does it improve adoption?
Reduce churn?
Increase usage?
Improve stickiness?

8. Building a great product doesn’t mean
adding a bunch of tangentially
related features.

9. Unless customers use a feature,
it may as well not exist.

10. Problem
Solving

11. What are all the different ways we can
solve this problem?

12. What is our ideal vision of this feature if we
had unlimited time and money to build it?

13. What does our V0 solution look like?

14. And does this solution meet the customer
need while driving an outcome?

15. Continue refining the solution until we have
an MVP that fits our customer needs.

16. How do we know when to stop iterating and
refining? (i.e. problem-solution fit)

17. When our customers tell us “this works…
when can we use it? Here’s my money!”

18. And when they tell us “this doesn’t quite
work yet”… we keep iterating.

19. is the most important part of the product
development process.
Feedback

20. Feedback is how we know if we are right.
Or wrong.

21. Feedback is how we learn.

22. So we want to get feedback as quickly as
possible. All the time. So we can learn faster.

23. And it’s important that everyone on the
team is talking to customers and users.

24. This helps everyone build empathy with the
customer… resulting in better products.

25. Agile
Design

26. So wow do we design solutions in an agile way?
…Through a collaborative process.

27. Collaborative design is all about getting
multiple perspectives on a problem.

28. You can’t design in a vacuum.

29. The team needs a deep understanding of
the problems users are facing.

30. Collaborative
design
≠
design by
committee

31. A camel is a horse designed
by a committee

32. Design should be fully integrated
into the feature team.

33. Design
Engineering
Pairing + Sharing
Sprint Work
Sprint Planning

34. Designer-Dev Duo
Go somewhere for an hour, kick around ideas for solving a
problem, and land on a direction for next steps.

35. Discussion can’t happen with big bang
design reveal

36. Try placing designs and flows on the
wall to encourage discussion

37. Encourage designers, developers, and
PM’s to demo every week.

38. Workshops can help define big feature
work

39. Design
Engineering
Pairing + Sharing
Sprint Work
Sprint Planning
Workshop
Sprint Planning
Design Spike
Sprint Work

40. Define the problem we are trying to solve
List any assumptions we may have
Share around persona cards, putting feet in shoes of
the customer
WORK
SHOPS

41. Build,
Measure,
Learn

42. Solutions should always meet a customer
need

43. … while driving an outcome

44. … and be ethical, viable, desirable, and
feasible.

45. How do we know if the solution we’ve
produced is successful?

46. Through an experiment driven
methodology.

47. Success should always be defined and
measurable.

48. Example
Product wide goal
to grow active
users by improving
retention.
50% of people
who download the
app never activate
on the product.
How can we
improve the user
experience to
grow active users?
How do we
measure success?
Product Objective Opportunity Product Challenge Feature Target

49. Start by defining the most important metric…
1. Directly ties back to the product objective
2. Measurable and simple
3. Starts with a question

50. After you release your iteration, share your success
1. Did you hit the target? Why? Why not?
2. Summary of qualitative insights
3. Next steps and future iterations