How would you improve Microsoft Teams?

1. Describe the Product

MS Teams is a messaging application used to communicate with users. MS Teams picked up traction during COVID and is one of the go-to applications used by business and working professionals daily to collaborate with users primarily within their organization. MS Teams allows users to chat, make audio, and video calls, and share files to engage with others.

MS Teams is available as a standalone desktop application, web application, and mobile application.

2. Ask Clarifying questions (Scope that an interviewer has, specific to a modality - web or mobile, what improvement means, )

What are we trying to improve - user acquisition, user engagement, retention, or revenue generation?
Are there any constraints for this improvement like geographical, time, or budget constraints 

We will be focusing on improving user engagement and would be concentrating primarily on the desktop and web applications as they are the most widely used as compared to mobile.

3. Choose a goal  (Example: Increasing revenue, Increase the number of active users, INcreasing usage, Increasing engagement, Increasing retention)

Increase productivity and user collaboration by improving user engagement.

4. List unique user groups and Describe users 

User Personas

1. Working Professionals

2. Teachers / Students

3. Online learning platforms

Working Professionals
       1:1 communication (chat, audio call, video call) with colleagues
      Meetings - Team meetings, Scrum meetings (co-located work environment, WFH / Hybrid setup), Meetings with customers or 3rd party vendors, Townhall

Teachers / Students      During the COVID lockdown, many of the schools, and colleges used to conduct their classes on Teams. however, with everyone going back to normal the usage has now dropped considerably and is now limited only to extra doubt-clearing sessions or similar sessions.
 

Online learning platforms
    Few of the learning platforms use MS Teams to conduct doubt-clearing sessions, conduct online classes, or work on capstone projects.

5. Select one user group to focus on and specify the reason why
We would be focussing on Working professionals for our improvement as they are the bigger customer base for MS Teams.

6. User Pain points
A. Time lag to load new MS Teams if a user has too many open chats (unhidden)
B. Copies of document are created when the same document is shared in more than 1 group. In this case, the document owner has to update all copies shared in MS Teams so everyone is looking at the latest copy.
      C. Notes-taking is a task for the meeting organizer if they are presenting the screen. Transcript is available in case the meeting is recorded however that may not be feasible for every meeting       D. The organizer cannot extend the meeting series if the existing meeting series expires. The existing discussion in the meeting chat group cannot be carry forwaded to the new meeting invite. This becomes a challenge when searching for any data shared in the past as it will reside in the old meeting group which might be buried under a pile of chats       E. User cannot add a new participant to an existing 1:1 chat with a different user. A new chat group needs to be created.
      F. Many times the chat group has loads of information and a user that was recently added to the group has to go through the start of the chat and come backward to understand the issue/discussion in the chat group. Alternatively, another user from the chat group has to summarize the discussion to the new user to bring them up to the speed.

7. Prioritization  - prioritize based on User value, business cost 

Pain Point User Value Business Cost

A High High

B Medium Medium

C High Medium

D Medium Low

E Medium Medium

F High High

    Based on the user value and business cost analysis, we would like to improve the following User Pain points.

C. Notes-taking ability for an ongoing call

D. Ability to extend meeting invite series

E. Add new participants to the existing 1:1 chat and share previous data.

8. Solutions

C. Notes-taking ability for an ongoing call

    Solution 1: Implement Voice-to-text functionality to capture the transcript. The organizer can then manually sift through the transcript, create Minutes of the Meeting and share it with the group with the Action items

Solution 2: Implement AI to capture meeting transcript, read through the entire data, and create MOM along with the action items for the appropriate stakeholders. A follow-up meeting can be scheduled based on the agreed timelines during the meeting. 

D. Ability to extend meeting invite series

Solution 1: A notification can be provided to the organizer before the series expires and the organizer can take appropriate action 

A snooze button can be provided which would remind the organizer if he requires time to think about extending the meeting series

Solution 2: Allow the organizer to merge 2 chat groups as one, in case the meeting series was not extended due to any reason. This might be helpful for old meeting series that had expired before this improvement is made available. The organizer may not want to see notifications for the already expired series when the new improvement is made available.

E. Add new participants to the existing 1:1 chat and share previous data.

Solution 1: Allow users to add and selectively share data from 1:1 chats

Solution 2: Allow the user to merge 2 chat groups with data from a specific date-time. This way user does not have to copy-paste data from old text to the new group.

9. Prioritize the solution 

Pain Point C -  Solution 1 - As we need to train AI based on the regional languages used which might take a considerable amount of time. Also, Voice-to-text APIs are readily available. We can initially build this using voice-to-text and then incorporate AI as we progress in the next iteration. 

Pain Point D - Solution 1 and 2 both as I feel both would make a positive impact and add value to the user. Solution 2 will also be useful in improving E.

Pain Point E - Solution 2, as it will be same as Pain point D.

10. Success Metrics

Pain point C - We can measure the Confidence of conversion in Voice to Text API to determine the success for this implementation

Pain Point D - Solution 2 - # of merged chats, # of search requests on old data from merged chats.

Pain Point E - Solution 2 - # of merged chats

Limitations

With the implementation of Pain Point C, the performance may be impacted as additional resources will be required to process Voice depending on the meeting duration. the behavior of the functionality might be a question when the spearker has slow internet or connectivity issues.

Clarifying Questions:

Is this for a desktop app or mobile App? – Both

Are we focusing on a Global Improvement across regions? – Yes

What are we trying to improve here?  What is the Goal? Improve Revenue, Engagement, New users, and Retention? – You Choose

I am going to choose engagement as Microsoft has a larger user base for Teams and the goal would be to improve the user experience or engagement. Does that sound OK or do you want me to go on a different path? – Yes, it’s fine.

Do we have any constraints w.r.t budget, resources, timelines – Yes 1-year time frame. No specific limitations with regards to budget or resources

Product Description:

Microsoft team is a collaborative tool that helps people to interact via 1: 1 message, Group chat, audio & video calls, conduct meetings, share documents, etc

Goal: As we agreed based on above, we will focus on user engagement

User Groups :

1)    Working professionals who use teams for daily work like meetings, standups, sharing docs, calls etc.

2)    Student, Teachers – Who use teams for their academic courses, education etc to teach, present topics

3)    Trainers – Training organizations who use teams to conduct trainings on various technologies / topics etc

I would like to focus more on working professions who represent the largest audience of this market. Does that sound good to you to proceed? – Yes, please go ahead

User Story/Pain Points:

1)    Unable to jot down notes quickly when talking and presenting topics in a call especially when there is a large number of topics to be discussed.

2)    Team meetings that involve people from different geographies. Difficult to understand conversations if one of the meeting attendees speaks in a different language

3)    Sending team meeting notes or a summary of the discussion.

4)    Getting a real feel of meeting especially during a hybrid/remote working environment

5)    Attending/Listening to calls during traveling like in a car

6)    Attending long meetings can be tiring. Something which can rejuvenate employees as a follow-up

7)    Teams Channel – Currently, the Teams channel is used only for tracking projects, documents, group chats, actives, etc.  More information regarding Employees' schedules, and work could be tracked here which could be beneficial during meetings, project status, and Project planning discussions. Currently, Team members have to look through isolated applications to find this information.

Solutions

1)    Use AL/MI to pick key points from the live transcription and present it to the team organizer to customize it further. There can also be a capability to integrate Teams with outlook where the meeting notes are sent to Outlook of the organizer for further review

2)    Use audio conversion bots/tools for attendees who are not speaking in same language as intended for the meeting. For example, if a person only understands Japanese for example, and is also a key member of a meeting, there is no need for another attendee to act as a translator if the MS team's bot could do this translation job.

3)    AI/ML could summarize the discussion after the meeting based on notes presented in step 1). This could also be integrated with Outlook so that it saves the organizer’s time in sending Minutes of meetings.

4)    Revolutionize the experience of teams by using VR where the meeting attendees feel as if they are sitting next to each other in a meeting room

5)    If a user is traveling or driving, provide an ability to project teams meeting into a car’s touchscreen or dashboard so that they can attend and listen to important calls. This would need some kind of integration and Authentication between Car’s Touch Screen Software and MS Teams.

6)    After long meetings, MS teams could come up with predefined features like playing soothing music and dimming laptop lights to improve mental wellness.

7)    Teams channels could Integrate with other HR apps like Attendance and leave management which could provide information on absent members and their absent duration in an information Icon beside the team channel name. This would help project leads in better planning as this information could be leveraged right here without relying on offline emails, discussions or Company HR apps

Prioritization

Based on the above table, I would like to prioritize 1), 3) 6) and 7) as they could be leveraged with existing technologies like AI/ML , APIs which Microsoft already uses. Integrations can also be leveraged using APIS and APIS are generally exposed by any applications like attendance, absence tracking

Metrics of success:

1)    And 3) – Measure the percentage of people sending notes and summaries using this feature.

 7 – Percentage of people clicking the information icon to view project members’ leave/absence data.