Dynamics 365 Sales Collaboration
Dynamics 365 Sales is one of the fast growing selling application under the business applications group inside Microsoft. It is Microsoft’s Customer Relationship Management product. We are a team of 300 developers, program managers, and designers between USA, India, and Israel. We worked under “scrum” feature crews with leads of each discipline. I was the design lead for the Relationship Intelligence and Collaboration features.
My Role
Integration of Teams inside Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Sales inside Teams making the collaboration workflow seamless for sellers
Collaboration Lead
Led the vision and shippable collaboration features for our product launching this April 2021 to Public Preview. I worked with:
2 Program managers
1 UX/Visual designer (+me)
1 Engineer lead
7 Engineers
1 Researcher
When I came along to help the other designer, the team was struggling with the direction and interaction to go towards. I was able to quickly ramp up, and lead the designer to a solution. Since I came when the designs were due and they were not flushed, I had to quickly jump help out, design, and find the key problem we are trying to solve.
Allow sellers to quickly collaborate on a deal without interruption to their workflow
1) Collaborate and find pain points
I collaborated with the Principal Group Program Manager and Engineer Lead in order to drive the right strategy and providing solutions to pain points our customers currently have. I participated in customer calls which lead me to provide the hypothesis by understanding their workflows. With the customer calls, I was able to help discover the pain points and how to prioritize our features that can provide solutions to them. Impacting the work we will be doing for the next release and building relationships in the team as well with customers.
Customer centric
With the customer calls, I was able to help discover the pain points and how to prioritize our features that can provide solutions to them. Impacting the work we will be doing for private preview, such as gathering insights on creating suggestions for the collaboration pane, and building trust in our relationships with our customers. This brought clarity and validation towards our direction.
Brought visibility to a key customer on how Teams integration with Dynamics brings value for them to potentially make the switch from Slack to Teams.
2) Collaborate to find technical constraints, limitations and dependencies
There were many limitations and dependencies. Since our platform is UCI and does not provide flexibility , we had to chose to surface Teams not contextually but globally as a Version 01. We also depend on Teams APIs and have some limitations, they do not provide all of the features they have on their desktop app. This creates confusion to the users who think they will have all of the tools. Never the less, we were able to ship something very quickly and we were the first Dynamics product app doing this integration. So, we were the frontiers and have influenced how other apps can integrate Teams.
3) Collaborate and Ideate
Through collaborating with the squad, and showing different concepts often and early, we would come up together as a team on the best MVP experience. I created multiple designs and prototypes to see which one benefits the user and is cost friendly. Since the dependecies on Platform and Teams existed, I had created also a list of pros and cons on our navigation , so from where and how will the user access this feature.
Aligned with the Teams team to ensure we deliver the best experience and bring collaboration to the Dynamics for Sales product. This brings consistency and leveraging the experts mindset. By bringing them early on the process since our brainstorming stage, we were able to influence some of their embedded chats designs to cater our customer needs. Syncing with them early and often ensured they felt part on our direction which influenced their designs as well.
4) Validate and test
We showed our concepts to our customers by sharing our prototypes. They were onboard, so we also had research create usability tests. Usability testing for the designs came strong, not a lot of updates needed to deliver the MVP for private preview. Usability study metrics was average 4.8 out of 5.0 saying that they will use this feature at least once daily. This address to our customer needs which provides value.
I improved the first concepts of Collaboration feature done previously by 70% including usable interactions for suggestions and creating the primary channel experience, which are our version of "rooms". This brings a better user experience for user adoption and brings us closer to our competitors.
5) Share and align
Shared with other Dynamics products, our collaboration efforts and our direction to ensure consistency and helping them onboard with technical limitations. This influenced how they will put collaboration in their product. They liked our side pane approach and leverage some parts of it. As well, I ramped up the designers on the technical constraints for designs and how the API given by Teams work vs what Platform works. This achieves optimizing their time and not designing something that won't be able to be developed.
6) Extensibility
We are now doing the extensibility story. Now that we have our MVP done, I am focusing on the extensibility story, so how can the user see their Dynamics 365 Sales data inside Teams.
I am defining the data sets they would need to see by talking to customers and seeing our telemetry on what context is interacted the most. From there by focusing again on the main problem we are solving,
"As a seller I want to quickly share and review my deal with my colleagues”
This helps to remember to do something simple and quick for the user since we are not replicating Teams in Dynamics nor Dynamics inside Teams.
Aligned with Teams for the collaboration features focusing on our customer pain points and created the extended story of one Microsoft how you can go from teams to dynamics and vice versa. This brings extensibility to our product as well as tells the Microsoft as one story.
“You demonstrated candor and a sense of humor in all stages of design and remained open-minded and willing to entertain other’s ideas and welcomed different point of views. I really appreciate that you approach partners with a can-do attitude and always seek to learn about other groups/teams’ key initiatives. You have built a good relationship with MSX and Teams team, and that will continue to be an important one, since Collaboration will be a multi-wave/release and we need their support to build meaningful experiences for our customers together.” Design Manager