Kickstarter (2013)
In 2013 I left Seattle for Paris to join the Xbox Music and Video Engineering Services team. I had taken an Operations Program Manager role with Xbox Music Operations, but quickly transitioned to Program Manager Lead and led the Media Services Catalog division.
We owned a swath of engineering and were focused on video automation. Five PMs and 36+ engineers building a world-class catalog and service that provided a streamlined platform for Microsoft Movies & TV, Groove Music, and Books. We developed and executed a functional and operational framework for media operations to enable scale, reduce cost, and increase efficiency while integrating 3rd party channels & developing partnerships with Gracenote, IMDB, Bandcamp & Movies Anywhere.
Right after the move to Paris, in true corporate tradition, we were reorganized. We became part of a larger engineering team and organization, which was called MVA (Music, Video and Advertising). Our leadership and engineering was split between Paris and Seattle. Yes, a lot of travel this did make.
The Directors, and we PM leads needed to bring collaboration and cohesion to a space that historically had been under resourced and under funded when stacked against games. Games was the bread and butter of the ecosystem. But, Xbox was making a play for the living room, and so movies, TV, music, books and magazines were critical to its path forward.
We were faced with the challenge of reviving the excitement for products, bringing cohesion to the team and driving collaboration across and org with 200+ engineers, program managers, UX designers, financial consultants, ops PMs and advertising leads. A motley crew.
At the time, Google was in the news a lot for their 20% projects that they supported. A lot of articles and similar programs had been popping up in the news and at other companies. While at first we scoffed at the idea of reducing our output to allocate a significant portion of development time to the team, we started asking around and talking to our devs. What we found was that there was a lot of passion and there were a lot really great ideas out there, but no format to drive them forward.
Engineers don’t think in terms of feasibility to ship a something like legal, or finance, or product. They ask themselves, can I engineer this? They weren’t equipped with the tools and support to drive an idea forward as there was a lot of red tape, and we had a locked roadmap with critical milestones to hit for the next two years.
Luckily, we had a leadership team that was supportive and they let us burn one week in the quarter to test out our initiative, which we named “Kickstarter”.
The rules were simple:
You had to drive forward an idea and create a product or demo centered around movies, tv, music, books, magazines or advertising. It could be anything.
Everyone had to participate (even HR, unless we hit a P00 bug!).
You had to demo at the end of the week.
Dedicated product, UX, legal and financial SMEs with office hours would be available.
Everyone got 3 votes to vote for their favorites at the end of the week.
The winning idea would get added to our backlog and shipped.
At first, the engineers looked at it as an inconvenience, but we quickly offered incentives with prizes and then it became a competition, and bragging rights. The teams did not disappoint.
The Director of Engineering and I built Achievements for media accomplishments (i.e. watched a movie, bought a tv show, rated a movie, made a playlist) outside of Xbox LIVE using their achievement system. One team soddered together old equipment from around the office and when they played a song on Groove Music it played across the various machines they’d cobbled together, another team ripped karaoke lyrics and built an app that sat inside Groove Music, another team pulled in obscure facts that popped up while you watched a movie, another team created the concept of a global ID for all media. There were brilliant ideas. Some were fun, some solved critical problems.
Kickstarter was so successful that we allocated two weeks per quarter to it. We set up live meetings so the cross-country teams could collaborate easier, and flew the winning teams from the last round to Paris or Seattle.
We got smarter about Kickstarter as well. Teams had to pitch an idea and get at least five people to join in order to drive it forward. We encouraged diverse team backgrounds that were not all engineers (add a PM or financial advisor), teams needed to created a pitch deck and present it. We also allocated time for teams that were stuck on a problem to share it in our weekly “Form” meeting, where engineers would pre-design features and form ideas on how to solve them, getting feedback from the entire engineering team.
We gave the team the tools to be innovative and creative and they excelled. The “lost” productivity never occurred, we shipped more features and hit milestones ahead of critical dates the next two years.
I later created a similar program while at O’Reilly Media with my mobile development teams called Buildathing. We allocated two days at the end of each two week sprint to building out ideas that they cared about, with the only stipulation that it couldn’t be something we had in backlog. The team collaborated with the UX Design team and built a web app concept to overhaul the O’Reilly Conferences app which ended up being adopted and the team expanded their role to own all facets of the O’Reilly brand across mobile. I was super proud of that one.