11 kinds of people in Microsoft product group

The first is product planners. The main task of product planners is to investigate, and also to investigate your competitors, customers, and other market needs. The process of product planning is actually the process of defining a product. Generally do a lot of research, by tracking market users, do market research, look at industry reports, then determine the product 3-5 years of development planning. In fact, as a product planner, the most important thing is to be forward-looking. Not only can you clear the current market, but also see what it will be like in 3-5 years.

Microsoft has a lot of products, there is a saying that "version 3.0" may be at 1.0, 2.0 is not very good, there may be a function of the problem, but also may be ahead of the market, like windows, to make the time, whether from the hardware or software applications, there is no market, But through continuous improvement, by 3.0, it has achieved great success. From this point of view, product planners are very important.

The second category is product management personnel. Somewhat akin to being a traditional market person, but not exactly the same. Their main task is to bring the products to market. Including the determination of product positioning, packaging. The most important point is to convey a message to the user. That is why the user buys your product or upgrades it to your product. Many people say that Microsoft's products, in addition to good quality, the market has done well. Like IE is a good example of market operation.

For example, IE's initial user orientation was not to try to get Netscape's existing users to go to IE, never to do so. Instead, it is targeting new internet users. This is the user positioning is very clear. In addition, for different versions of IE, the development of the focus is not the same, you need to use a simple message to tell the user, this version of the benefits of other versions. These are the product management personnel to do.

The next role is program management, we previously called Project management, but the last time I spoke in Shanghai, the students said, they said that the domestic project manager does a very different thing, so here I call program management. Sometimes I might exchange it.

At Microsoft, program management is primarily about making products and introducing the right products at the right time. The main difficulty he encountered was how to keep control. The right time means you have to control the release schedule of your product without delay. People know that the product process is not certain of human factors, this release date control, it is very difficult. And make the right trade-offs. Sometimes you have to make a trade-off between the release date and the new feature. Or is it not to adopt new technology, with new tools, algorithms, what is not necessary, whether we need to do, what to do and what not to do, to make trade-offs, so as to control the characteristics of the product and enable it to meet market demand. Program managers need to weigh the dangers of doing these things to be particularly clear.

These three categories of personnel to the entire product planning, market, and product development process Control is basically set up, can be said that the most critical.

The rest of the product design, mainly to do the product's user interface or visual aspects of the design. These people generally have a design background. Like Microsoft's products, the previous focus on user interface design or user interaction is not much, because the traditional PC, the early is only a professional tool. But now more and more to consumers, the initial user direction, then for the interface design more and more high. The company has invested a lot of manpower in this respect. I don't know if you all see the new Windows XP, or not like "MSN Explorer", these products are compared to the traditional products, the appearance, including the way users use. are completely different, pay more attention to a whole experience, experience.

Product design also has an important job is to ensure that all visual parts of the product are consistent. Different modules or different features may be developed by different people, how to ensure that the visual part looks the same, so that users do not suddenly feel that a product is not the same company's products, it depends on the product designers.

The fifth type of personnel is the product usability assessment engineer, and they are mainly to ensure that products are available, easy to use, and can be easily accepted by users. Generally in the process of product development or early, there are a number of different prototypes, that is, for some features how to do, how users interact, design a number of different prototypes, and then to the usability assessment engineers to do usability testing. To determine the final solution. Microsoft has always attached great importance to this.

You may notice that in the earlier version of IE, there was no "go" button in the Address bar, just an address bar. But later, through usability testing, some users found that the address had been knocked in, waiting there and not knowing to press ENTER. There is indeed such a person. So starting at 5.0, add a button to the back of the address orchid. After the user has hit the address, you can try clicking the button to connect to the page he needs.

The next category is the developer. Developers should be important in Microsoft, but I don't feel as important as some companies in our country. The main job of the developer is to design some algorithms to provide feedback on the PM's documentation or feature description. A more important piece is to help PM launch the product schedule, from when it can be "beta" 1, 2, when it can be released. These are closely related to the developer, so the developer decides its progress. In addition, it is common to write code, programming and debugging, and later defects repair.

The next section is the tester. Microsoft attaches great importance to testing. Testers need to complete the product development process independently. is not affected by other people, complete the test independently. In other cases, as the user's spokesperson, the user's interests in the first place. If you think this product is out of order, be sure to stick to it. Of course, this often leads to some heated debate, deciding whether the problem is to be solved. But the end result is to benefit the user.

The next category is Microsoft's unique localization staff. I think this may not be very applicable to everyone at present. But in the future, we will be able to bring our products to the world, there is a process of globalization, but also through localization to meet the requirements of other markets outside China, so there is bound to be demand in the future. Another type of person is a document release, which includes web site documents, software documents, which are primarily to help users use the product. There are also developer-oriented, code examples that are the main work of document publishing. The development documents we have traditionally talked about in Microsoft are PM to complete, and that is, all program managers write very detailed feature descriptions for each feature at the beginning of the project.

Another type of person is a product support person. This is also very important in Microsoft, on the one hand Microsoft and end user of the most common way to deal with, often a lot of users call this problem, in the future version will be able to solve it. And most importantly, in the case of Microsoft, the user has to pay for every phone call, in fact, product support directly affects the company's turnover. Providing faster and more effective user support is the most important part.

The last role is the operation management, the actual is the website operation management. As we all know, Microsoft products are more and more closely integrated with the Internet, as we do now, "Hotmail", "MSN Calendar" and other products, itself is a website. The operational management role is not there, it is only in the last two or three years the newly developed role, in the future will become more and more important. Because you are different from the traditional packaging products. Before you can say I finished the CD, the product released, it is OK.

Because the user buys the product, you already make money. In fact, when you do the online service, your software release is only a start, the user only use a day you need to spend money, will affect your entire profit. In fact, online management is very complex, such as "Hotmail", now has more than 110 million users. At the front end, there are approximately 5,000 servers running Windows 2000 to satisfy user logins. There are many servers in the background to send and receive mail, storage, is a very complex system, because there is the underlying network, hardware, and the operating system, as well as the above your application, coupled with the internet itself is an uncertain environment. How to manage this complex system is very challenging.

Because unlike traditional applications, users can walk away anytime. And there's a lot of uncertainty, like our traditional products, the more users buy, the more money I make. But at the time of connecting, the user can sometimes be a problem, that is, you may not support so many users. For example, there are many people to visit, your site is not able to meet the needs of so many users access. The website runs also often needs to advance to the traffic, or to the user number satisfaction makes the more accurate forecast. Operations management is becoming more and more important in Microsoft, and many of the design of the product will affect whether you can run it properly. So it's a new requirement for other people.

Now basically, the four categories of people who run management, product planning, product management, and program management actually drive the product process. Others play a passive or focused role in doing specific things. But every role is indispensable.

We talked about Microsoft now basically has 11 jobs. How can these people be organized to be more effective in the development process? Microsoft is now basically a so-called compartmentalization structure. The most basic organization within a company is a product unit, such as IE, which is a product group. The manager of the Product unit group has a budget and someone has money. In each product unit, administratively according to your type of work, like the project manager, he will have a total project manager leader, such as developers have a development team leader, testers are the same. This is an administrative organization.

The main structure of the administrative organization is to make some assessment of your performance, including whether it will give you a salary increase in the future. When making products, in each product unit group, and according to different characteristics of different groups, divided by the basic principle is to be a very lean and small team to develop. Because I said to the different characteristics of the Product Division organization, which requires you in product design, large products can be divided into small modules and small characteristics, and then there is no great compliance relationship.

Because cross group interactions or cross group compliance relationships are the hardest to manage. Each team is basically a project manager, or the program manager to lead, to take charge of a feature, there will be developers, there will be testers, basically developers and testers are generally 1:1 of the ratio, such a group of almost 10 people, is the most basic development unit. Some of the technology-related decisions are basically made by the project manager, and there will be no one above to decide. This organizational structure makes it possible to make decisions quickly in some business and technical terms, and because each group has fewer people, it enables large teams to move forward as quickly as a small team, without affecting efficiency.

Take the IE product Group for example. It has different people at different times, and the number is different. The first IE1.0 is a few people, IE2.0 may be thirty or forty people, to IE4 when basically to 300 people's project team. This is the composition of the 300-person project team, the product unit manager, which is the most basic unit of the Product unit, so the Product unit manager is the big Boss. There are five product planners, 20 product managers, 50 project managers, 100 developers, and 100 testers, as well as documentation releases, because IE also has some SDK and some online Web pages and help files.

There are 10 people in the document. This kind of personnel structure is also based on the characteristics of the product, or you are in the middle of this version of your focus to decide. Also in IE product group. At the time of IE5.5, there were more than 300 people, but the project manager had only 15. than the IE4 50 people are much less, developers also only 40 people, because to IE5.5, basically the characteristics of the stable, IE5.5 for the end user to do less work, mainly in the stability and performance improvement, and a number of companies big enterprises Users to do some support, so the number of developers and project managers has been reduced, but a lot of testers, testers 200 people, mainly in the IE4 feel less, so in the IE5 when the organization of independent Test team to test.

IE Industry Group is divided into 10 project groups, each group of about 10 to 50 people, basically responsible for a product module, such as browsing, or HTML editing, printing. But there are times when a project manager will be responsible for more than one feature, and even some developers may have expertise in some areas, and he needs to flow between different organizations, so this kind of organization is actually dynamic.

Now let's talk about the Microsoft product development process. The basic principle of the development Process Division is that you want to divide large projects into several milestone development cycles, and consider some redundancy in each cycle to make your development cycle more practical. The objective description is to ensure that all people develop in the same direction. Use product characterization to guide the development process. At the same time use the user's data to determine the trade-offs of some features, or priority scheduling. Add this feature, not developers feel good, I do this thing, often or from the user point of view, users from the middle of how much revenue to decide.

A more important point is the unified terminology. The same kind of training will be done within Microsoft, and the various roles will be invited to do a lecture, which may take about six or seven hours. There are many terms, abbreviations, and the introduction of this development model. So that all people understand is unified. So you can make sure that everyone's understanding is the same whether you're doing something or talking about it.

There is also a point in the development of products in the process of continuous testing, rather than finished to a certain stage to start testing, because often that time is too late.

The Microsoft product development process is divided into four phases, the first of which is the planning phase, which is basically driven by product planners and project managers, primarily to accomplish such things: one is the goal description. Based on this product goal, we already know what we need to do and what features to do to achieve this goal, which determines what functionality the product offers. Then PM will be based on this function to write the appropriate specifications.

General product specifications, is the traditional technical documents, basic will write two times, the first time to write a simple, which lists the features you this function or what you want to meet the requirements of our entire product objectives, what is related to the product compliance, why do this feature. After writing the feature description of this page, people will sit around and have a look, prioritize, what we do first, what we can do, or what the next version is doing. Once this is done, the program manager will write a more detailed description of the feature, which is a technical document that directs the development and testing of the entire process. Basically, there are some templates.

In the planning phase, when all the specification is finished, a schedule is made. The schedule schedule often needs to be attended by developers. See these product specifications, based on your experience estimate how long it takes to do this, but also need to break into some redundancy, after this finished, the product planning phase has been completed.

The marking of the product phase is the target description, the specification of all features, and the completion of the schedule schedule. This goes into the second phase, the development phase. Because we have the feature description, we already know what to do. So according to these characteristics, this phase will be divided into three to four small stages. Basic Division principles are important or mutually compliant characteristics begin to do, some of the remainder of the time important. will be done in the second or third paragraph. This segment is promoted by developers.

All developers start writing code, and each developer has a corresponding tester who will test the code written by the developer. The mark of completion of this phase is called feature completion, or code completion, that is, all of these features have been developed. This is the next stage, the test phase. The testing phase is driven primarily by testers. During the development phase there are also tests in progress, but in the testing phase the main integration of the test, such as installation, compatibility testing, performance, or other aspects of the test.

In addition, a number of "beta" versions are often issued to allow users to actually use concurrent feedback. There will be more bugs in this phase, but this phase will basically not add new features. The mark of the end of this phase is the so-called "zero defect". Microsoft has some tools to track bugs or bugs, and if you see bugs that have no activity in the release cycle from these tools, this marks the end of the stabilization phase. Now there is a trend, that is to stabilize the stage to do more and more long, so as to better ensure the quality of products.

After the zero defect, it entered the next release phase. At this stage, you will continue to track the status of the bug until you are sure that it is ready to be released. Usually make a CD, or send it to the Internet. The final release phase is implemented jointly by the Product manager, the project manager, and the person doing the operations management.

To sum up, the Microsoft product group has a clear division of labor and different roles, product development consists of four phases, namely the planning phase, development phase, testing and stabilization phase, and the final release phase. The general principle in Microsoft is a detailed division of labor and responsibilities, through the role of each person to control the product development process. The four processes I've just talked about are 11 roles, but each role is actually not synchronized.

For example, product planners, in the first and second stages of a product planner, will have some work, and in the third phase because the feature is complete and there will be no new features, the Product planner has already started the next version. But the product manager will continue to do the product to ensure that the product continues. There is customer demand to determine the direction and objectives of the product, often in making some decisions to consider the customer and the market, rarely purely for technical and other reasons. The most important thing is to divide the big project into several subprojects, which is gradual, not to solve the big problem at once. There are also target descriptions and product feature descriptions, which are our traditional documents, which are instructive for the entire project and must be clearly defined so that everyone can see it.

Finally, get everyone involved from the start of the project. Because a good product is designed, not the last developed, because the prophase basically set down later, the development of the later stage is completed. If the design is flawed, such as failure to take into account technical support issues, it is difficult to do later. If added to the product quality or release date will have a great impact. There is the continuous testing to ensure the quality of the product.

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