hangin' out with the MVPs

Before joining Microsoft, I hadn't heard of our MVP program. MVP stands for Most Valued Professional. They're people around the world who aren't Microsoft employees but who have become experts in our technologies. They share that expertise freely, and Microsoft recognises them for all that they do to share that expertise.

MacBU has several MVPs, with deep expertise in our products. I've been able to meet some of them at MWSF, and I got to meet many more of them this week. Microsoft sponsors a regular MVP Summit, where our MVPs have the opportunity to come to Redmond, learn more about what we're working on, and spend time with the product teams to do deep dives into our apps. I've spent the past two days in our sessions with our MacBU MVPs. It was hugely valuable. We shared with them some of our earliest thoughts about our future releases across the board, and got their feedback about it.

I also had a chance to present to them a wrap-up of the work that my user experience team did for Office 2008, and gave them more detail about how we do usability tests and recruit users for those usability tests. They asked what a usability test might look like, so I ran them through an on-the-spot example using My Day. I told them what task I would ask the user to complete, and what I'm looking for with that task.

Hmm, I've been on a My Day kick recently, so maybe I'll share that task list with you guys in a future post.

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 17, 2008
  I really wish I cold have made it to the summit :- Corentin