For decades, I’ve watched users and developers long for
capabilities in Windows and .NET that never happen. Sites like Connect and User
Voice collect our ideas and votes yet
backlogs rarely react.
I believe product teams often chase the next big feature,
forcing themselves to ignore small, love-creating
improvements or tweaks that would build tireless loyalty from their user base.
For this reason, I would like to propose a new idea. A
way to solicit, not feedback, but ideas from a user or developer community in a
way that gets results and creates wonder.
What’s wrong with User Voice?
This isn’t about
User Voice, per se. The site’s fine. It’s about the reaching into a product
team and impacting their backlog. Giving great ideas a social momentum that gets
recognized as valuable.
We know up-voting ideas for Visual Studio, .NET, Windows,
or anything else barely matters. I’m not being cynical but go look – the list of
outstanding ideas is astronomical. But, it’s reasonable.
Team capacity.
There are only so many product managers and so many engineers on any team.
Their capacity to do anything has a real limit; asking for the moon is
sometimes simply impossible.
Team priorities.
There are roadmaps follow and next versions to build. Sometimes the best ideas
simply don’t align with where a product is going; asking for THAT features just
doesn’t work.
Team turnover.
There is velocity-crippling turnover to consider. People move on, change happens,
and the team might be rebuilding itself; asking for anything is crazy, just
staying afloat is job one.
Internal politics.
There are many things far outside the control of a product team. Reorganizations,
changes in corporate priorities; asking for something might simply be
impossible, considering.
Market change.
There’s a real need to survive. Sometimes companies like Microsoft over-correct
and create a brand-new problem; asking for something in this environment can be
a stalemate.
In the end, outside developers and users of a product are
important but are also a single voice in a chorus of influences pushing on the
priorities of a product team. That’s just reality.
Side-effects
The rise of open
source, if you ask me, is, in part because of this. Developers frustrated with
expressing desires (to Microsoft) and not seeing an acceptable response, took
things into their own hands.
The rise of more-frequent product releases is another.
Product teams aching to deliver functionality to their community but hamstrung
by larger constraints found a workaround, for better or worse.
It’s also worth pointing out that, especially in
developer tooling, buckets of features
are released every quarter as a direct result of user feedback. But nobody
is denying features are left on the table.
Impacting priority
We can’t change capacity. We can’t change reality. But we
can change priority – most of the time. This idea is rooted in a social contract
with Microsoft agreeing: if the community does X, the team will do Y.
I assume you know what Kickstarter is. That side where
someone with an idea gets socially funded; a grass roots approach bypassing
traditional channels to get innovations and inventions realized.
Now imagine this: a
site like Kickstarter for features. Where users or developers contribute to
the feature with real money, pushing toward a target that, if reached, the
product team agrees to deliver.
Where does the
money go? Not to Microsoft. Every feature is a fund-raiser for a charity. If
we raise $100,000 for breast cancer research, we’ll add a Purple Theme to Visual
Studio. See what I mean?
Here’s another one: We’ll make Windows Forms work on Macs
if we raise $250,000 for Doctors without Borders. Teams can target timely charities, too. The
point is, it’s a social agreement to do it.
Why would a product team do this? Because corporate
citizenship is real. Because diversity and inclusiveness matter to Microsoft. Because, doing something good is a true
motivator.
How much would a developer have to contribute? That’s the
beauty of this. If you contribute a single dollar, you’re a contributor. Visual Studio has nearly 5 million users a
month. This is possible.
Let’s all agree on one more thing. Software developers
are not the lowest paid people on the planet. And why not do some good instead of complaining on Twitter? It’s
twice the reward.
Well, do you think it could work?