Things have changed a bunch at MS since I started here...6 years ago monday. Some good, some bad. One of the good things that's happened is that we've spent more time interfacing with customers. Our products have obviously been successful and we've used customer feedback to get there but it hasn't been a tight loop and MS has always looked like this big black box to the outside world.
We've been working hard to change that by spending more time getting involved personally as members of the community. It's been a very rewarding experience for me and my team but I'm starting to wonder about how exactly we measure our accomplishments versus the other things we're trying to do. The reason being that as the number of people that use the product grows, our ability as a (small) product team to support that community becomes less and less. I've got a team of 17 people, and users that number in the hundreds of thousands and growing every day. And they've got all kinds of needs from legitamate bugs that are blocking them to how-to's for some really interersting ways they're going about things. Most take at least a few hours to investigate, understand, etc. So I'm trying to understand exactly what the sweet spot is for the community as a whole. How does one bring the community into the process and help make them successful without completely eating up our ability to deliver great new features they are asking for in new versions?
Hmmmm....