FindTime

FindTime originated within a small core team of six employees focused on incubation projects, tasked with talking to customers to find ways to make calendaring and time management more efficient. Originally released through the Garage’s experimental outlet, FindTime was received very positively by customers.
“The key was communicating with customers and validating the idea before building out any solution.” Kevin Stratvert, original member of the development team, stressed the importance of collaborating with customers all along the development lifecycle and after shipping.

The team embraced hack culture with a customer-obsessed mindset that laid the groundwork for their success. “The most challenging part of the process was finding the right idea to invest in.” Chris Hoorn, a software engineer on the original team, explained the many iterations FindTime went through in the early phases, and how testing out different ideas with customers and failing fast allowed them to zero-in on the best solution that filled customer needs.

The team landed on solving a big pain point customers were experiencing with traditional meeting scheduling – not being able to see free/busy times on calendars leading to a great deal of email tag back and forth. Sometimes individuals could spend hours trying to schedule a meeting with folks across different organizations.

With this problem in mind, the team built a basic solution demonstrating FindTime’s core functionality – voting on meeting times – and released it internally at Microsoft for validation and feedback. They intended to continually improve functionality and UI, and as more employee thank-you notes poured in after using the prototype, Stratvert knew they were on the right track. “That’s when the team got serious about it, and we considered eventually shipping through the Microsoft Garage and releasing it to the public as an Outlook add-in.” After achieving validation internally from users, releasing through The Garage would help gauge if the problem resonated with external customers as well, and validate that the FindTime solution works.

“We had hundreds of thousands of users sign up and start using FindTime. After talking to the right customer segment where a solution like this is valuable, and after validating through The Garage with a broad set of people, we went to the Outlook team.” Kevin and team showed Outlook which types of customers it resonated with. “When you pitch a project, if you can show customer stories with both the quantitative data like how many meetings were scheduled using FindTime, and the anecdotal data of personal customer experiences, you paint a better picture that illustrates value and how your product has positively affected peoples’ lives. It’s a lot more persuasive.”

From working closely with Outlook over the last two, FindTime is now owned by the Outlook team who are committed to continually investing in and supporting the add-in, much to customers’ delight. Eventually the product team hopes to weave FindTime into Outlook as a native experience.

The project team learned a lot from working on FindTime, but the most unexpected side-effect was how appreciative they are of the company’s willingness to invest in various efforts including small incubation projects like theirs.
“I think it’s a good sign that we were able to go through this whole process. Not everybody has the chance to take a product from its infancy and go all the way to a major platform like Outlook. I think that shows a lot about Microsoft – they saw value in something that started small and are investing in it.” -Kevin Stratvert.