Truths & Insights

In 2018, not long after joining Microsoft, Pradeep U.N. took part in his first ever Microsoft Global Hackathon. In his role, he researched how to empower sales teams in the field to better understand customers’ needs. How do you uncover unmet customer needs without a rigid process? What are ways to open the conversation to truly have empathy for customer pain points and better engagement?

Bringing his experience as an entrepreneur, Pradeep had an unconventional idea to deeply understand customers’ needs and help not only the Microsoft account teams, but also the customer and their leadership, discover new insights about their business.

During the 2019 Hackathon, Pradeep created a project inspired by the collaborative dynamic of board games. Though he had been researching ways to enable customer success prior to the hackathon, his idea got a critical boost once he formed the hack project.

With a small team of curious hackers who brought their passion for customer obsession to the table – employees around the company such as business program managers, sales managers, developers, and finance managers – the Truths & Insights project began taking shape. The team spent valuable time rapid prototyping and customer testing what type of game resonated with sales teams and landed on a fun, competitive card game.

During summers, Pradeep would continue to leverage each annual Hackathon to build upon what had been created and each spring test out the outcomes at global internal leadership conferences to encourage customer-facing teams to engage customers. At the 2019 Hackathon, the project won a Customer Experience award which indicated a growing appetite within the company to leverage it as a tool for collaboration.

“Our early customer-ready prototype was just a print-out on cardstock paper, cut by hand,” Pradeep recalled. Back then, he was Director for Microsoft’s Customer Executive Board and spent time meeting with customers worldwide. Pradeep recalled during a trip for a conference when he first showed the handmade Truths & Insights prototype game to a group of enterprise Chief Information Officers, while they were all traveling on a 90-minute bus ride together. “They didn’t even open their phones; they were completely engaged talking to each other. Customers found the engagement interesting and were surprised how quickly they were discussing digital transformation topics.” A “workshop in a box” as one of the customers called it, deceptively simple cards that could deliver unexpected insights through the power of prompts, conversation, and gamification.

The game enabled crucial conversations around digital and business transformation, leveraged by internal groups, and field sales and delivery leaders who facilitated game sessions with customers. It quickly gained traction with fans internally and with enterprise customers, winning marketing excellence awards and recognition such as the ITSMA Marketing Excellence Gold Award.

Played in 26 countries, with over 5,000 players, and 12,000+ stories shared, Truths & Insights has achieved a Superfan following essential to its continued growth. “Superfans” span countries in different roles and organizations across Microsoft – people who are passionate believers of the game and the impact it can deliver to customers. These volunteers form the network of support who are willing to plan, organize and demo Truths & Insights to help leaders and teams facilitate their own game sessions and arrive at insights unique to their customers.

In addition, Truths & Insights has seen startup-like organic growth within Microsoft. Multiple large divisions are incorporating the experience into their regular rhythm of businesses for customer brainstorming sessions and project kickoffs.

“I utilized hackathons to get executive visibility, attract more people to the cause of uncovering insights, and to help us facilitate these collaborative conversations with groups and organizations.” Pradeep explained.

Though there is already a digital experience that brings the physical card game online, one that is accessible and available in multiple languages, there is more work underway to take Truths & Insights to the next level as a robust, digital platform. Pradeep is now in a new role, Senior Director for Inclusive Innovations, focused on doing just that, and delivering solutions for focused customer discussions in topics that include sustainability, accessibility, and transformation, to industry customers.

In the autumn of 2022, Truths & Insights as a digital, social-learning and culture transformation platform saw significant growth – Pradeep launched the digital offering of Truths & Insights at the HR Tech Conference in the Microsoft Theater in September 2022, featured in multiple sessions with Microsoft Viva. He introduced audiences to how Truths & Insights can be a way to create connection and team cohesion during a time of shifting workforce composition in a hybrid/virtual environment.

The digital platform is now available as a service offering for enterprise customers. With the ability to customize the Truths & Insights platform based on their organizational culture needs, customers can now create their own digital editions on topics they want to explore and roll it out in the organizations globally to be played on communication platforms like Microsoft Teams. Built on Azure and powered by Azure Cognitive Services, the digital platform provides all the benefits of the analog card game, and in addition, delivers smoother engagements, easier facilitation, and gameplay at scale in accessible means with transcriptions and screen reader support. Most importantly, Truths & Insights digital platform can provide organizational insights through user stories, reactions, and AI generated sentiment analysis to drive digital and cultural transformation at scale.