Self-Disruption

Pascal Carole & Stephanie Hsu

People love to talk disruption. The tech world has embraced Clayton Christensen’s original concept and become enamored with the idea of transforming a market with a new product; There’s always some archaic way of doing things that’s ripe for replacement. Yammer saw that social could be brought to the enterprise, and would enable people to work in a more open and connected way. Instead of relying solely on closed email, information could be shared across the company at a revolutionary pace. People could organize around groups and share anything from project updates to best practices. Work would be social, open, and changed forever.

One may think that it’s as simple as just building this radical technology and the masses will flock to it. However: even if you have the elusive product market fit, and even if that’s been validated by phenomenal growth and a memorable acquisition, and even if you’ve had customers rave about the way your product has transformed the way they work, and even if you’ve unearthed underlying commonalities betweens those customers that have given insight into the organizations of the future, you’re still not done.

Most people have a way of doing things they’re already comfortable with, and are hesitant to learn yet another way. As Yammer Product Managers, how do we continue to build on our disruptive idea?

People start using Yammer and the first connection they make is to Facebook. While some of that has to do with the design of our product, a lot of it comes from what social network they’re most familiar with. And as much as that’s helpful in explaining the value of the product, social in the workplace means something different. The focus is less on solely sharing and discovering interesting content, and more on driving productivity by enabling users to work like a network.

So how do we take the incoming expectation of the product and transform that into an empowered way to work? Being a Product Manager means forming hypotheses about these types of questions, experimenting, and sometimes (or often!) failing along the way. Our hypotheses are often inspired from own experiences using the product, and critically thinking through the behavior we want to continue to promote. We spend a great deal of our day in conversations — asking questions, providing feedback, and sharing updates among the Product Team, and engaging in similar discussion in both our project teams and the larger organization.

Not long ago, one of us came across a conversation on Yammer where another team up at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond were discussing a project very much related to some work we were just starting to tackle. We checked out the slides attached, replied with some questions and comments, and found an opportunity to connect in a way we wouldn’t otherwise have. Soon after, that team actually came down to our office to participate in some brainstorming. One flight, three meetings, and many more mocks later, a concrete hypothesis and plan for what we should build and test first had emerged. All this because one of us saw a post on Yammer that wasn’t directed at us. Great! The system works!

But! This adventure illuminates a new challenge: say I’ve joined a bunch of useful groups, but now I’m not necessarily seeing every message posted to them… I’m going to start missing some things.

So how do we fix that?

This is just one example of things that got us thinking about how we can make sure people are seeing messages relevant to them. When a user logs in to Yammer, there’s a feed that’s discovery-oriented. As you post, receive messages and participate in groups, Yammer gets smart about the priority of that activity. You get messages addressed to you served as the most important items. Yammer begins to understand which groups are most important to you, and gives you a quick way to determine if you want to dig deeper. And of course, at the end of all that awesome productivity, there’s still room to discover and find out more about what’s going on at your company. The more you work in an open-by-default environment, the better you’re able to work.

So it’s not enough just to disrupt with a new way of doing any old thing—that’s simply the first step. On our path to disrupt the enterprise market, we’re now aiming to fundamentally change user behavior, and to create pathways and entry points to guide our users along the way.

Disrupting once and calling it a day isn’t enough; you have to continuously disrupt your disruption to make real change.

Pascal Carole and Stephanie Hsu are Product Managers at Yammer. If you ever challenge them to an eating contest, their combined love of food and super-human ability to eat it will destroy you.