Windows Phone Dev Ecosystem – One Year On
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.
Posted in Windows Phone | 51 Comments »
