My Hit Refresh moment that lead to creation of a new product: Kaizala

This was an epic week, filled with moments of learnings, innovation and customer success! This week, I was in Philippines for the launch of Microsoft Kaizala, and this week I also completed reading the book “Hit Refresh”. It is an inspiring book by Satya Nadella, a leader from whom I have learned tremendously during our 15 years of association – as my manager, mentor and inspirational leader. The book ends with a thought provoking enquiry: “What does it mean to Hit Refresh? “.

I thought, I’ll share the story of a moment in my career when I had to ‘hit refresh’. Three years back, Satya asked me a simple yet profound question - "What does productivity mean in a mobile world?". My response to that was that I don’t know.

I had been building Office for mobile phones for more than a decade, but I did not know the needs of the mobile users; I knew we needed to get Office apps on the phones, but that did not imply that productivity on phone was only Office. I had to find the answer, I needed to learn with a growth mindset, I suspended my belief and embarked on this quest. 

This simple yet powerful inquiry took us on a year-long learning journey to fourteen countries across five continents, meeting thousands of customers and organizations. The goal of this research was to understand what mobile phone user’s expectations were to be productive while on the go. What we learnt was that in lack of productivity mobile-applications, people had plugged-in consumer technologies into organizational workflows. The phone number had begun to emerge as an identity and chat applications were playing a big role in accomplishing a lot of work.

These make-shift solutions had its flaws. People aspired for structure in unstructured communication. Key announcements were being lost amongst a sea of ‘good morning’ messages. These chat applications failed to map the complicated people networks that exist within and outside the organization, leading to creation of ad-hoc groups, putting organizations valuable data at risk. It lacked a private channel to converse with customers to get their feedback. Collecting data became convenient but deriving actionable insights was a herculean task. The lack of extensibility meant significant hours spent in transferring data from these applications to the organization's core systems. 

After months of customer interviews and insights, we decided to start working on Kaizala with a vision to "Empower every organization and community to achieve more through secure and purposeful chat". Microsoft Garage acted as a perfect platform to launch Kaizala and gauge the customer impact. Just like any startup the initial months of Kaizala were full of struggle. We pitched it to multiple customers before we finally got a break to use Kaizala for effective management and coordination of Pushkaram 2016[1], a mega-festival celebrated on the banks of river Krishna, with an expected turnout of 20 million over a period of 12 days. An incident during the event, where Kaizala played a pivotal role in uniting a missing child with his parents re-affirmed our belief in the effectiveness of Kaizala. Witnessing the scale of Kaizala at Pushkaram, it was chosen to enable real-time governance in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, thus benefitting a population of close to 53 million.

Since then there has been no looking back. Today it is being used in multiple departments of state and central government. The Andhra government also launched citizen connect to enable citizens to give feedback directly to the Chief Minister and report grievances. Kaizala has found adoption in well-known enterprises and government departments in India such as, Yes bank, Apollo, Republic TV, UPL, KVS, Niti Aayog, etc. It has made it easy for these organizations to collaborate and complete workflows across the network of employees, citizens, customers and suppliers. Some of these organizations have also used Kaizala extensibility platform to integrate it with their existing business workflows. This has unlocked huge value for their mobile-only workforce and has simplified their ability to manage their customer and supplier network. I feel excited by the vivid use-cases Kaizala is being put to use by our customers, and the impact it is continuing to make in redefining productivity for network of people in modern workplaces and modern digital nations.

My Hit Refresh moment, lead to the road to Kaizala – I learned, I failed, I improved and built a product that now we are releasing to multiple countries across the world. Hit Refresh is a way to re-energize yourself, to re-learn, and to “let the future enter into you, in order to transform itself in you, long before it happens.”

[1] Article in The Hindu

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