UK trip – Research and Meeting with the SBSC

This week I’ve been over in the UK, meeting with SMB customers and partners for researching future versions of our products and spending two days with the UK big_bensubsidiary.

Research

You might be wondering what goes on when we research products?  Well, we start by identifying our customers and partners we want to enable and then bring them to a research facility.  These facilities are several rooms, each room has an adjoining room that sits behind a one-way mirror.  You guessed it we sit behind the on-way mirror.

Over the period of a couple hours we have a moderator ask questions that we’d like answered or we think could identify problems that technology might solve.  We also ask lots of questions about how these customers and partners make decisions and prioritize their work.

The end objective – have valuable data to allow us to make decisions and build products that support the SMB infrastructure market.

Working with the UK sub

The second half of my trip is all about understanding how our current products are doing in market, and what changes/new tactics we can do to better support the partners and customers out there.

To understand this I ran a roundtable session with various members of the community to learn about the challenges and successes in the market.  We also use this time to discuss some of our thinking on technology in SMB.

I want to thank all of you that came along to this session! I’m heading back to Redmond with some great ideas, and over the next few months will be working with the UK team to see what ideas and feedback items we can implement.  Unfortunately we wont be able to action all of them, but we’ll definitely evaluate the feedback throughout the day to see what we can action.  If for some reason you couldn’t make this session feel free to email me using the link on the right hand side.

Next we’re heading to Milan to do a similar loop.