How data scientists and researchers are helping Microsoft product groups adapt during COVID-19

By Michele McDanel (opens in new tab)

Photo credit: iStock

Data scientists and researchers on Microsoft’s Customer Insights Research (CIR) team (opens in new tab) are focused on gleaning customer insights that help make products better. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and stay-at-home mandates, the CIR team that works with schools has been partnering with the Education product team at Microsoft to help them understand what is happening with teaching and learning in remote settings and to improve workflow management.

Adapting to the sudden spike

“When COVID-19 hit, it was like a fire for us,” said Sooraj Kuttykrishnan, a senior data scientist on the CIR team. His counterparts were seeing significant increases in Microsoft Teams usage over prior projections in just a few weeks’ time. This increase was impacting not just Teams’ capacity, but also downstream applications and services such as SharePoint.

But because the speed of the pandemic upended normal routines and protocols, there was no time to conduct research. Instead, the focus shifted to enabling customers.

That’s where data science came in. The CIR data science team who were familiar with typical Teams usage, volunteered to forecast how many users would be coming into which services, when, and in what regions. “If you can predict which regions are going to need capacity and when, you have more flexibility to mitigate capacity issues and make sure you have the right servers in the right places,” Kuttykrishan explained.

Identifying new patterns

At first, this posed a bit of a challenge for the CIR data science team because every pre-COVID-19 pattern they had seen didn’t hold true anymore. So, the data scientists dug in further, doing what they do best—examining the data and finding the patterns in this new reality.

“Ultimately, we were able to give the Teams product team a forecast that provided some runway, so they could increase capacity where it would be needed,” Kuttykrishnan said. CIR’s data scientists have been providing rolling four-to six-week forecasts by country, accounting for seasonal patterns unique to usage by education users.

Another workstream involved analyzing the downstream capacity increases needed beyond Teams product usage. For example, researchers are looking at the impacts to applications and services that users typically access after logging in to Teams. This is part of a company-wide effort to support this extended period of increased data use and unprecedented workload for technologies across the board, as the stay at home guidance continues.

With a commitment to addressing customer pain points and to improve workflow management, product teams continue to work on uncovering data to determine where and when to increase capacity and compute power.

Looking at the longterm

Conducting distance learning at a global scale, for an extended period, is a radical change, with long-term, lasting effects. As data scientists lean in to help customers in the short term, CIR researchers are also adapting: the team is changing their planned research calendar to understand user needs in a whole new light.

Led by design researcher Scott Ososky, one study looked at K-12 educators’ experience implementing eight typical Teams tasks, designed to mimic a first-run experience in getting a classroom established. The study revealed which tasks were completed without problems and which were more challenging

“We’re just scratching the surface of how teachers, students, and parents are using our products for remote learning. It’s important to understand how people are using the technology and what their pain points are so we can inform future product improvements,” said Ososky.

Beyond education, the impacts of COVID-19 on the way we work and communicate (opens in new tab) are also numerous—and may not be immediately obvious. Researchers can benefit from partnering with their data science counterparts to better scale research, more precisely target the questions they want to answer, and understand the “whys” of customer behavior. This article (opens in new tab) by Data Scientist manager Jodie Draper provides a useful framework for doing so.

While so many have scrambled to adapt to the new normal of remote work, there’s comfort in knowing that data science and research are working to understand what we need to be productive. We eagerly await the results of their work and will update this blog with those findings as they become available.

How do your data scientists work with user researchers to improve product experience? Has COVID-19 changed any workflows? Tweet us your thoughts @MicrosoftRI (opens in new tab) or like us on Facebook (opens in new tab) and join the conversation.

Michele McDanel is a builder, an organizer, and a storyteller with a bachelor’s degree in Communications and an MBA. Michele is energized by solving problems and meeting business needs through communications and customer experience solutions that raise the bar. She enjoys building relationships and managing teams; and overall, just figuring out what the “special sauce” is that will be the competitive differentiator for a business and its solutions. Michele joined the Customer Insights Research team in 2019 to amplify the great UX research and data science work they do, and to showcase the thought leadership of the team across internal and external communications, events, and social media.