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Developer Solutions Team FY07 Success Factors Draft

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I’ve recently been tasked with collecting what you might refer to as organizational goals for our little Developer Solutions team. I think of them as… if we did these 5-10 big things over the next year our team could be considered successful. This is my first take at defining these. I started with our team charter that has already been defined with a mission statement and tried to tie in the success factors to the categories that I’ve already laid out.

Mission Statement: Deliver and encourage the timely creation of developer focused solutions in self sustaining communities.

There are really two sides to this business.

  1. Make our developer support communities and channels great. The most visible manifestation of this work can be seen in the MSDN forums… a site that our team drove the creation of and continue to manage through our relationship with the community moderators.
  2. Address product limitations and pain points. You probably have seen the early results here as the release of the Power Toys for Visual Studio.

The business can also be related. For example: we could release a set of tools that allow people to more easily integrate forum posting, snippet sharing in communities, and collaborative development. This would be a case of addressing product limitations to drive healthier communities. So, now that I’ve added some context, here are a set of “success factors”

Success factors for making our developer support channels great in FY07

Category: Factor

  1. MSFT Community Engagement: Microsoft Product Support Services is engaged in our online communities (forums & feedback centers) as the first line of defense and moderation for released products while product groups continue their primary engagement with CTP communities. PSS involvement assists in driving up the overall answer rates to > 60%.
  2. MSFT Community Engagement: Customers can easily escalate questions to paid support channels from the community without losing context. MVPs can escalate any questions to the product groups.
  3. Community Improvements: A community reputation system and forums API is released based on the specs and requirements we defined. The forumsAPI is adopted by at least one non-MSFT forum site.
  4. Community Improvements: A plan has been published and started on to enable questions to turn into feedback center bug reports and vice versa.
  5. Supportability Tools: At least one publicly available tool is released by our team that makes life easier for MSFT and non-MSFT moderators.

Success factors for Address product limitations and pain points in FY07

Category: Factor

  1. Power Toys: Identify & develop at least 6 additional tools to be released in the next year. Bringing the suite to 9.
  2. Power Toys: Onboard community members to existing Power Toy projects and assist them in their efforts to publish updated releases with additional features and bug fixes.
  3. Power Toys: Define shared source release guidance and best practices that are adopted by at least three other teams looking to publish their projects and code to the community. Deliver guidance on what types of projects should be released to the community from Developer Division.
  4. Non-MSFT Solutions: Partner with other teams in Devdiv & across the company to organize at least one coding contest/event that drives the creation of shared source developer focused solutions from the community. Define and implement a solution for getting non-MSFT open source projects publicity and assistance from the community.
  5. Non-MSFT Solutions: Drive the release of a set of solutions designed to make it easier for developers to share content with each other through MSFT and non-MSFT community sites. Help define next generation Visual Studio community integration scenarios.

Keep in mind this is the first draft and you are seeing this at the same time as most of my team members so this list is totally subject to change. The concerns I have with this list are that:

  • It may not be “big dream” enough for the next year.
  • It’s missing really specific metrics to track towards success. Only a few of the goals have a concrete fail/pass measurement associated with them… of course we could go on debating the validity of having a system like that for every goal. I’ve always thought it best to just “do great things” in your area and hire people that feel empowered and capable of doing the same with minimal direction.

As I start to get feedback I’ll simply be updating this blog entry. Feel free to add your comments below. What do you want to see out of our team in the next year? If you work for MS, how could we help you? If you’re a developer what projects do you want to see us tackle?

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 09, 2006
    I know this probably doesn't fall within your remit, but perhaps you can influence. Someone has just pointed out in a comment on my blog that the certificate used by https://connect.microsoft.com/ - and therefore by the Visual Studio and .NET Framework feedback system - isn't recognised by Firefox, or by Apple's Safari. Avoiding this sort of issue would certainly help to improve community feeling.

    More directly in response to the points raised in your post, I don't have any good, specific suggestions, which is why I didn't respond earlier; however, I would like to take the chance to say that I think you've got the right approach for the PowerToys and I look forward to seeing what else your team produces.

  • Anonymous
    June 09, 2006
    I've forwarded your feedback about connect.microsoft.com along.  

    Thanks for the vote of confidence that we have the right direction.

  • Anonymous
    June 15, 2006
    Last week Josh posted his Developer Solutions FY07 success factors draft and asked me to write-up the...

  • Anonymous
    June 26, 2006
    Gavin: I've been told that your issues have been fixed. If this is not the case, let me know.
    josh

  • Anonymous
    May 28, 2009
    PingBack from http://paidsurveyshub.info/story.php?title=scooblog-by-josh-ledgard-developer-solutions-team-fy07-success

  • Anonymous
    June 19, 2009
    PingBack from http://debtsolutionsnow.info/story.php?id=3072