The title is a bit misleading as I have been in role for close to two years, but Windows Phone has been in market for a year.  During the course of the past year, I learned quite a few things, and have been asked a number of questions from the community.  I wanted to take this time to share some of those learnings, and answer a variant of the most common question I get (both internally and externally): “how are you guys doing this?”

Upon starting in role, the person who recruited me for the position (Charlie Kindel) walked me through what he calls the 5Ps.  This served as a very useful framework for thinking through how our team was going to tackle the very real problem of being in last place for developer ecosystems, and building excitement and driving recruitment for a pre-released mobile OS.

When we first met as a team, we sought to lay out what we though were the foundational principles for our work.  This is essential, as it makes it very easy to say “NO” to things when you have clear principles.  Since our fiscal year runs Jul to Jun, we have refactored our team principles for our current fiscal year.  We did this based on the experience of the year we had behind us.  With that in mind, I wanted to share some of the principles from the last fiscal year.  No real corporate secrets here, and in fact, some people will say that this is just common sense.  Maybe so, but the results have been building, with the new IDC/Appcelerator report out (expected press coverage), and it looks like interest in Windows Phone development is at an all time high.  Awesome.

Inspire Developers

The problem facing our team was essentially one of a cold start reboot.  We had to start with a completely new dev platform, new tooling, and the fallout of a clean break from Windows Mobile 6.x, making many of those developers angry.  The bottom line message for the team, and our extended team in our DPE org (Developer & Platform Evangelism), was to build the message and demonstrate the clear opportunity of building on Windows Phone.  For the first year, this involved heavy upselling of our investment in the long term success of Windows Phone.  However, it also necessitated that we have improved reach and effectiveness with our outbound communications.  This meant landing our stories with the press, but also engaging with developers on a 1:1 basis where possible.  An impossibility to execute with our team alone, the partnership with our DPE org led to the creation of our mobile champs program.  Having local feet on the street in the countries where we were selling phones was critical for developer support.

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Subject: Ms. Muffet would run scared from you.

Why Miss Muffet? Because we are looking for someone who has unbelievable _web_ skills.  Get it?  Web…Spider? No? #facepalm

Befitting our desire to stand out with our job postings, I give you one rendered in tweets:

Our team has a serious bunch of people who take #winning very seriously…but we have no tigers’ blood #ImportTariff

Specifically, we are on the Windows Phone Apps org, and we are responsible for the App Plat and the breadth dev ecosystem #WhupAppsForShort

We are looking for an amazing web technologist who wants to advance to state of the web on mobile devices #LovesWindowsPhone

Our purpose is clear: “Cultivate a developer ecosystem that delivers outstanding mobile experiences.”  #TopThatGoogle

You will have broad responsibility: ensuring top 20 web sites look great on WP & educating breadth web devs about the same #YouAreABeautician

You will find those places where WindowsPhone web stands out against the competition, and shine a light on it #CompeteToWin

You must have the mind of a genius but the heart of a teacher, because we have to reach loads of web devs #ScaleItUp

This will be an incredibly challenging position, requiring lots of cross group collaboration #TheWhatAndTheHow

There are 2 screening questions: 1) do you code as a hobby & 2) have you successfully marketed a dev platform before? #HardToFind

The person who thinks they can and the person who thinks they can’t are both right #WhichOneAreYou

You can read about the job here: #WhatAreYouWaitingFor

I was doing some birthday shipping for my wife a few weeks back.  I actually had to hold off on posting this write up because I didn’t want to tip her off to what sorts of things she might expect for her birthday.

This post isn’t about her birthday, however, but rather Amazon and their collaborative filtering mechanism which makes recommendations to you while you are shopping.  Given that the search term with which I started was “gymnastics mats,” I can understand 4 of the 6 of these recommendations.  I can even go out on a limb and convince myself that, yes, people who are likely to be buying gym mats need to keep deer away.  Think of the liabilities to the gym studios when that first deer hurts themself.  The rules just aren’t set up for four legged participants.  Sadly, Bambi and her friends are really into gymnastics, and they keep hanging around.

It was the book recommendation that really piqued my attention.  The book itself is a parable style yarn about leadership and psychology.  Think “Chicken Soup for the Bad Manager.”  The scary thing is that I have read this book.  My manager suggested it as one of those great books I needed to read.

So I am left wondering what type of people are buying gymnastics mats from Amazon.  Are they type A business execs who are fashioning home gyms for their gymnastics bound children?  Are they incredibly driven, though perhaps misguided, leaders who are building gymnasiums?  Or is this simply a case of Amazon having a bit of fun with me, knowing that I read that book, and that I have deer eating the grass in my yard?

So I’m sick.  Sick and travel are never fun.  Recycled air on the plane is usually the culprit.  Sick sucks.  In particular, it sucks when you are out of your element.  Travelling in the US usually affords you the ability to walk into any familiar looking pharmacy and choose the appropriate cold medicine from the dizzying array of choices.

International travel comes with its challenges, but most of my travel for the last few years has been to familiar western culture countries.  When you get sick, you can at least understand some of what you are seeing in the store.  Identifying the cold medicine in Barcelona, even with Catalan, was doable.  My Spanish is passable enough that I can get by in most western European countries.  Well, Finland was challenging, but they speak very good English.

China is an all together different problem.  First, the character set is foreign to me.  Second, Beijing is huge.  HUGE.  I am having trouble orienting myself because no matter what direction I look, there are buildings.  Lots of buildings.  This is the first city I have ever been in where I didn’t immediately know where I could walk from my hotel to get basic snacks/soda.  I’m staying in a relatively nice hotel too, but there is no shop in the hotel.  Oh, and English is not a first class language here, so good luck when you have to deal with the local shop owner.  Hit or miss.

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This is a video thank you card to the men and women who work at Easton Bell.  My goal is to land this in front of Easton Bell President, Chris Zimmerman (I think I figured out his email).  I’m using all the tricks in my bag.  The tweet went out this morning, some buddy mails, this blog post, some spelunking through LinkedIn, etc.

I know I have next to no talent in movie making or editing.  I used my Flip HD and personal laptop on this project, working in close partnership with my companion – my beautiful 6 year old daughter.  She had a great time with the filming and the editing, and loved seeing the final product.  Sorry in advance for the wonky volume.

If you watch the video, and it touches you in some way…share it with a friend.  I would love for the team at Easton Bell to see the reach and impact of their products, to know that they each had a hand in saving a life, keeping a family together, and keeping a smile on the faces of my family.  It’s also nice to use social media to pass around stories of companies that done good.

**note: I think the email in question is CZimmerman@eastonbellsports.com.  I am going to send a link to the video with a nice note.  If anyone sends email to Easton Bell, please be respectful of inboxes, and remember, we want them to be happy about this.

A little nerd humor for the day. I got asked by some executives to “prove” that what we were doing was working.  That wasn’t so hard.  The next question was “how would you show return on investment for additional budget.”  I thought on it for a few moments, and wrote the following on the board.  The engineers got it.

That’s a screen grab from Visual Studio, which is now my desktop image.

I later shared this with some of my developer buddies.  What ensued is also pretty funny:

Friend 1: “Shouldn’t that be a property (e.g., Developers.AreHappy)?”

Friend 2: “It could be a complex function returning different values depending on the level of Developer.Fickle property."

Friend 1: “The FxCops will come after you for violating policy CA1024.  To Friend 2’s point, you could get a reprieve if making devs happy is a time-intensive operation. If that’s the case, however, you should review your entire architecture and implementation.”

I love my nerdy friends.

I have been asked by a few people how sites like WP7AppList get their data.  The Windows Phone Marketplace, which you access on your PC via Zune software, uses XML to get data over the wire.  I wanted to share a couple of code snippets which might help an erstwhile data junkie on their way.  This code works.  It may not be the most elegant solution, but it works, and I wanted to share it with others in case they wanted to see how to parse the XML, or how to write LINQ queries against it.

Caveat – this is a geek enthusiast post.  I used Fiddler to figure out how to parse the XML.  This was something I did over Christmas break to give me a project about which I could be excited, and learn some more about parsing XML with LINQ.  I also wanted to do some large database stuff, and this crawler throws off a ton of data.  I did not use an proprietary knowledge about how our backend systems are working.  This is all done against the public XML feeds.

First up, we are going to need to create some data structures to catch all of the inbound data.  You can use anonymous types with LINQ, but I liked having a measure of control, and having the ability to handle null values and potential errors in the feed.

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One theme that surfaced for me at SxSW this week was the incredible amount of energy being expended trying to find developers for projects.  It certainly is a theme that should help the guys at StackExchange, if only they figure out how to reach this audience.  I was in so many rooms where the number of companies with ideas needing devs outnumbered the developers in the room – sometimes as high as 25x in a single room.

At first I thought that this was a systemic problem with SxSW.  I’m not sure I have the data to support that conclusion, but there was a different problem afoot.  Each and every one of these entities with ideas was going about their developer search completely wrong.  Showing up with an iPad with large font text saying “I need devs” is not a good marketing strategy.

I also met quite a few companies trying to hawk their API wares and didn’t know how to go about getting developers excited.  The skill set I have been building over my working career is understanding the mind of the developer, and how to reach them.  I wanted to share this out so that others can reduce what was perceived as frustration as a lack of ability to find developers or get them excited about a project they had.

Go Where Developers Are

It’s a bit of an obvious statement, but seriously, if you are a company looking for developers, go where they go.  If you are at SxSW, they may not be at the meetups.  Why?  Because they are off demoing/showing their apps.  They are at these broader events for the same reason you are – to do business.  Developers are in hot demand right now, and that supply/demand imbalance dictates that they are not only busy, but not partial to interruptions.

Go where they go.  Is there a local iPhone developer group in your area?  What about a technology specific show (PyCon FTW)?  If the developers are at the event to learn versus to do business, you are likely better off.

Be a Coder

I got called a “marketing douchebag” on a panel at SxSW.  I tried not to take offense.  I am a product manager after all.  However, I am a hobbyist coder.  How can you be a developer marketer and not be?  I love spending time writing code to make something cool.  Is my solution the most elegant and efficient?  Probably not.  Can I wax philosophically about string interpolation of C#?  I can now (thanks Miguel).

If you cannot speak the language, or understand the issues, how can you have a constructive conversation?  More importantly, it’s just not as hard as you think.  Seriously.  We have a Windows Phone series for absolute beginners.  I know the notion of downloading tools may seem scary.  Try it.  Most of the dev communities have walk throughs to make it mostly doable by anyone who can install Office.  If you can wrangle an XLS, you can likely get through some of the really beginner stuff.  You may even like it.  Net net, being credible in conversations in the dev user groups means at least being conversant.

Have a Prototype

Even if your design is awful, getting your concept across with working code is FAR FAR FAR more effective than PowerPoint slides or your highly polished 25 words or less routine.  Here’s a secret about developers – any one worth their salt will see what you have and want to make it better.  They may want to join your project, or they may just give you some tips on how to improve on what you are showing so that the next dev who sees it may get interested.  Either way, you get some good feedback which is actionable by you.  You are more likely to not change your slides or 25 word pitch, and just move on to the next developer, but getting actionable feedback from a developer is priceless.

The other benefit of having a prototype – a completely unpolished turd even – means you have had to communicate your ideas to the screen.  That will show you the flaws in what you are trying to explain in words or PowerPoint, and makes for a much more constructive conversation with potential devs.  Your idea gets better simply by trying to work through it on the screen.

So there you go.  I hope that’s helpful for all the non-technical types looking to get to the dev community.  It’s a great time to be a developer, and so much positive energy around projects.

I normally post about technology here.  Business.  Entrepreneurship.  Customer service certainly has a place.  Today gets a personal rant, with lessons applicable to the above.  The short story is that I meant to have flowers delivered on Monday to my wife, and only today found out that ProFlowers would not be able to fulfill the order because they had no local vendor.  For the tl;dr crowd, here are the key lessons:

1. Don’t take money before you can fulfill the contract – The mere fact that ProFlowers took my money without a way to fulfill my order is crazy.  The fact that all of my interactions with them since Monday indicated none of this makes it even worse.
2. Bad customer service will be cemented in search indexes – I let the woman know on the phone that the days of hanging up on an upset customer were done.  I am codifying this here.  I have set up a Facebook group.  I will request that my tweeps retweet this whole ProFlowers debacle.
3. If you are in the business of delivering happiness, deliver! – Having a scripted response for a call center makes sense.  However, the flowers I needed on Monday were to handle an issue on Monday.  With each passing day, the value of those flowers decreases quite a bit.  Flowers can bring joy, but lack of flowers can actually create problems.
4. Flowers are not harder than pizzas – It’s not like it was some crazy arrangement that was ordered.  Roses.  How hard it is to cut some flowers and get them delivered?  I was told that I was in a remote area.  I live 10 miles from the Microsoft campus.  Hardly remote.  The pizza guy can get here in 30 minutes, and they actually have to bake the thing.

The story begins on Monday morning.  I ordered flowers to be delivered because I have been working quite hard, and traveling quite a bit.  With yet another trip coming up for SxSW, I figured it would be a smart move to have the flowers delivered.

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We’ve made no secret of the fact that we believe we have a great platform for developers.  The canvas we have delivered is enabling amazing creativity to flourish.  Some developers, however, have taken a wait and see approach to developing for Windows Phone.  For those who have taken the plunge, some developers are making more money on Windows Phone 7 than Android, even though we have less handsets in market.

Yes, this is a data point of one, but it’s a public data point about which we can talk.  There are many more stories like this on the horizon, but this is the first one that is verified by a third party.

Fruit Ninja has made 7x more money on Windows Phone 7 than Android.

That is the claim of the article.  Why is this?  There are many potential reasons, and I don’t want to venture into what could quickly devolve into a discussion based on opinions.  What we can say is that the data shows that the Windows Phone Marketplace works for developers.  It shows that customers of Windows Phone are spending money to buy apps.  It shows that that Windows Phone has great potential.

UPDATE (03/09/11 11:20A): The Xylogic data is what it is.  I won’t vouch for it, so short of taking this post down, I can only say that I cannot verify their Android data.  Is it a fair assumption that any overstatement/understatement they make for Windows Phone is same for Android?  Maybe.  I am not going to surface Fruit Ninja numbers as that’s not my place.  Unless Xylogic made a mistake in our favor (overstating $$ on Windows Phone) and against Android (understating $$ on Android), the ratio will hold.

Besides, and here’s the point that everyone seems to be missing – we have sold way fewer phones and Android.  Way.  Even if we were at parity on revenues, which platform is more appealing?  Don’t let the source of the data get in the way of the undeniable fact: the dynamics and structure of the marketplace on Android creates a challenge for developers to make money.  When Angry Birds can’t make money with per unit sales, that’s a sign. [END UPDATE]

We are still learning, and will continue to share what we learn with our developer community about what apps are working, how to market their apps, get noticed, etc.  However, the fact remains that for this developer, Windows Phone 7 has been well worth their time.

The smart money is to bet on the train that is leaving the station, not the one that’s gone.  Again, public data point of one, but this train is picking up steam.  As CNet noted, our mobile fortunes are tied to app developers.  Getting developers info like this is incredibly important to demonstrating that Windows Phone is a viable, credible, profitable platform for developers.  We will turn ourselves inside out to get developers whatever they need to be successful.

Still on the fence?  If you are an Android developer, and looking for a switch, reach out to us.  For developers committed to building on Windows Phone, we will take care of you.  Every developer matters.