Well, we launched Kahuna Milestone 3 (M3) yesterday with a new URL (http://mail.start.com). We are building Kahuna iteratively, and plan on releasing much goodness on a frequent basis. This is very different from the way that Hotmail and MSN has typically released software, but we feel it’s the best way to achieve success.
M3 is also the first milestone where I’ve been the release PM. Our previous milestone, M2, was developed in the traditional Microsoft fashion: spec, develop, test. It was a rather longish milestone, but was appropriate for the task at hand (we were building many things from scratch, so there was nothing to iterate on). When we shipped M2, we had most of the basics working well, and we could start to iterate, add features, scale.
I described some of this in our Kahuna video on Channel 9, but we borrowed heavily from Scrum. Myself and our dev manager, Dick Craddock, spent a fair amount of time refining and implementing a process that we refer to as Modified Scrum. We took the things we liked about Scrum, and tossed the stuff we didn’t. We basically made Scrum work for our needs, and left the waterfall model behind. With only one milestone behind us, it’s hard to say how successful it will be in the long run, but initial feedback from the team was pretty positive. The nice thing about our system is that we organized our pms, developers and testers into feature teams. These teams are basically self managing and develop their features end to end. It’s great to push that ownership down to the front line folks, and the tools that Scrum brings to the table (the burn down charts etc) allow us managers and leads to see how progress is going on a daily basis. It allows us to react much faster and see problems as they arise.
Anyway, at the same time that I was doing this, I also worked with a new team of developers and testers to get our MSN Calendar product back into Kahuna. This was the first Calendar release I’d worked on, and things went quite smooth. As a result, the Kahuna M3 release has a version of MSN Calendar that looks and feels just like the rest of Kahuna. It’s pretty cool!
It’s been an extremely hectic 2 months, and to be honest, it really stretched me to my limits. I had some bad days and some good days. It was a while since I’d been in the driver seat of a release, and I forgot just how trying it is. On the flip side, there is nothing I love more then getting a release out the door and using it for the first time (or seeing the customer feedback when they get their hands on it).
Having said that, we kicked off our next milestone, and I’m taking 2 weeks off to go to Egypt to visit my family, and then I’m spending a few days in Versailles and Paris with my wife. I probably won’t be blogging and I’m not taking my laptop (but we’ll bring Lora’s tiny Vaio). See you all when I return.
PS – I wonder sometimes about the amount of transparency you see at Microsoft. Channel 9 is amazingly transparent if you watch some of the videos. We have a ton of folks blogging about issues that you might typically only hear if you were in the hallway on campus. Personally I think it’s a good thing. The more people understand about how we build software, how we make decisions, and even what kind of people we are, the less Microsoft will feel like a company, and more like a collection of really smart and passionate people. I’ve been blogging since around 2001 now and this just started to hit me. I think it’s because I personally learn a lot from watching Channel 9 videos and reading MS bloggers. I feel that I’m starting to get almost as much information from these mediums as I do from internal distribution lists and conversations.