How Xbox fans inspired a fan-centric culture at Microsoft

We’re heading into one of my favorite times of the year. Over the next couple of months, we’ll finalize our plans for our E3 2017 briefing. As rehearsals begin and we see all the major announcements come to life, there's an air of excitement and anticipation that fills the room that’s built around one common feeling: ‘We can’t wait to see how our fans are going to react’. That’s why I love attending E3 every year. It’s one of the opportunities I get to really interact with our fans, and experience the amazing energy and passion they bring to everything to do with Xbox and gaming. Xbox fans really are the standard by which we measure fan-centricity at Microsoft. The teams of Phil Spencer, Mike Nichols, Aaron Greenberg and of course Major Nelson have done amazing work in building an incredible base of engaged fans. I admire their unwavering focus – everything they do has the gamer, the fan, at the center. This approach has had an extremely positive effect on the products, the Xbox engineering and marketing teams, and our customers. It reminds me of a quote from Elvis Presley, “Take care of the fans and they will sure as hell take care of you”.

While the majority of my career has been focused on understanding our customers – building products that they will need and love, telling the story of their creation, and courting their engagement and usage – it was really the Xbox One launch that reinforced for me the power of fans.

I had the honor of seeing fans line up for the launch – like gamertag kingodin79 – our first fan in line, who boldly claimed his spot days before the launch. As the days built, he was joined by hundreds of people outside the Best Buy Theater in New York. It was a cold week in November, but the fans were undaunted. I loved talking to the fans in line – hearing their stories, seeing their passion for their favorite games, and their heartfelt love of Xbox. Our team was so honored – we brought them hot chocolate, blankets, breakfast, and fun activities to pass the time. Ultimately, we all enjoyed an incredible launch celebration together, and my ever-lasting memories from that event are of the fans. Their commitment, their passion, and their love for Xbox inspired me.

My learning is that you cannot create fans, you have to earn them. As our team has embarked on the journey to build a fan-centric culture at Microsoft, I have learned so much about how to focus our efforts. There are four things things, that while simple and maybe obvious, make all the difference.

Do right

Balancing your business objectives with the needs of your customers is one of the biggest challenges you’ll face, but if you really focus on doing the right thing for your customers, you’re on the path. Doing the right thing is not always the easiest thing and that will be the truest test of your values as a company and your commitment to real customer-centricity. We’ve experienced these challenges ourselves with Xbox. With our initial announcement of Xbox One and our desire to deliver breakthroughs in gaming and entertainment, the team made a few key decisions regarding connectivity requirements and how games would be purchased that didn’t land well with fans. While the intent was good – we imagined a new set of benefits such as easier roaming, family sharing and new ways to try and buy games, we didn’t deliver what our fans wanted. We heard their feedback, and while it required great technical work, we changed Xbox One to work the same way as Xbox 360 for how our customers could play, share, lend, and resell games. This experience was such a powerful reminder that we must always do the right thing for our customers, and since we’ve made that commitment to our Xbox fans, we’ve never looked back.

Make exceptional products

This may seem obvious, but it really is the core of what creates the fan energy around your company. I see many products across the industry today that aren’t enabling customers to achieve what matters most to them. The mistakes I see range from rushing a product to market for timing or competitive reasons, trying to do so much that the product is a mile wide but an inch deep in value, or building tech that is incredible but that does not work in service of a basic human need. In today’s crowded market, it really is simple – it’s intuitive products that stand out and become integral parts of people’s lives that earn fans. I admire Amazon’s Echo product that began by offering a few simple but super valuable actions driven by just your voice. Tesla for combining the spirit of doing right in the world with their passion for cars. And Sonos for how they unlock the simple but oh so valuable ability to change a song at a dinner party while not leaving your seat at the table! It's these truly great moments that drive not just my own love of the product, but that lead me to recommend them to others. I catch myself raving about the some of the features, and I understand the power of making truly exceptional products.

Create connection

Many companies treat the initial transaction with the customer as the most important part of the journey. Any fan-centric company should treat that as just the starting point. In fact, every interaction with the customer after that is more important and should build a deeper relationship. Customers should feel like they have joined a community – a family. Don't be a faceless company. Enable your fans to interact with real people at your company, people who are fans themselves. This requires real commitment, time and effort. A fan is not only going to tell you what they think, but they are going to expect to hear back, to see you take action on their feedback. If you create the right connection it is not a token effort of outreach, rather it becomes the very way you build products and communicate about your progress. If you create a real community then the best thing happens: fans take it over and they drive the process connecting with each other and assuming your product as their own. It can be an incredible experience to see it happen, but you have to commit to the responsibility 24 x 7 x 365. We have had one of these unbelievable experiences with our Windows 10 Insider program. We count over 10M Windows Insiders today, many of them fans, who test and use the latest build of Windows 10 on a daily basis. Their feedback comes fast and furious, they have a relentless bar of what they expect, but it so inspires our team and drives our very focus on a daily basis.

Surprise and delight customers

Sometimes "the fan building moment" occurs when that little but delightful thing shows up unexpectedly. It can be simple, like the chocolates you didn't specifically ask for, laid out on your pillow in your hotel room. The cup holder in your car that can handle your extra large coffee mug. Pandora nailed one for me when they introduced a feature to automatically enable my top 4 radio station plays for offline use. It's the thoughtfulness, the going the extra mile, that demonstrates you really care about your relationship with your fans not just the use of your product. In our own experience with Xbox, it was the E3 2015 announcement of Xbox Backwards Compatibility and Xbox Play Anywhere features that elicited some of the biggest cheers from our fans. You hope to get such cheers from a new release of a game like Halo, but to get this kind of reaction for Xbox Backwards Compatibility reminded me yet again how delivering on the things that your fans really value trumps all. In this case it wasn't a great new game that we wanted to sell, rather it was recognizing the value and investment our fans had made in their game library on the Xbox 360 and enabling them to bring it forward that was the delight.

With our Surface products, our focus has always been on delighting customers by not just shipping beautiful products, but by doing the unexpected and creating new categories of computing like the 2-in-1 computer with Surface Pro. But it doesn't have to always be so hard or just about the technology invention. Sometimes it's just how you tell the story on the introduction to the fans that have come along on the journey with your brand. When we announced the Surface Book, the expectation was that this was just another laptop, and then in that moment in the introductory video by Panos Panay when the screen unexpectedly detaches to show that this device is so much more – instant surprise, instant delight. Same with the Surface Studio, when with a touch of a finger, the screen was laid flat and the Surface Dial pressed against it to inspire a whole new way for people to create on a PC. Our Surface fans appreciate those moments of magic on the introduction because they understand that we are doing it for them. And in their delight, we draw our own.

So today, as I go into every meeting to discuss a new product or service, I have that thought in the back of my mind ‘How are our fans going to react?’ Will they cheer when we introduce it, will we surprise them in a delightful way, will they immediately want to reach out to talk about it with us and give feedback? If I get that sense of excitement that I do when I think about our Xbox fans at one of our E3 briefings or launch events, then I know we’re in a good place.