How Microsoft 365 change communications best practices can serve as a template for enterprise IT

Why change communication matters

Microsoft comprises a large and diverse set of product organizations. Within each of its product families, Microsoft product teams continuously design, build, and launch new features. And beyond launch, features are modified and updated regularly. Whether you’re a customer, partner, user, admin, a CIO or other business leader, a vast group has a stake in what’s next for Microsoft 365. 

Microsoft 365 change communication is important because stakeholders have several reasons for needing details about what’s in the product pipeline. They must be able to prepare accordingly and assess whether changes can be immediately deployed or if they need to be more carefully considered. They need information and time to review changes for public or corporate compliance purposes, and they must understand expectations about when action is required. They also need to communicate changes to support successful user adoption. Above all, customers must maximize their investment in Microsoft 365 by matching the pace of releases and taking full advantage of the latest product innovations. 

Microsoft built the Microsoft 365 public roadmap process using its own technologies, including Azure DevOps, Microsoft Power Platform, Excel, SharePoint, Microsoft Lists, and Microsoft Forms, helping all of its stakeholders prepare for what’s coming and quickly bring innovation to market. 

Centralizing change communication with the Microsoft 365 public roadmap process

In 2014, Microsoft published a new roadmap every six weeks with about 30 items. Today, it publishes daily with more than 100 new items added per month, with the full roadmap rarely covering less than 1,600 items at any given time. The Microsoft 365 public roadmap team, which is composed of members from the customer experience, release and delivery, engineering, and product marketing teams, developed an interoperable system using Microsoft products and business processes to centralize and disseminate communications through the public roadmap process. 

The Microsoft 365 public roadmap provides visibility into the new capabilities that will be available in future waves of product updates. It includes individual update details, projected launch dates and timelines, and overall priorities for each product. 

Microsoft looks to help each of its departments, including dozens of engineering teams within Microsoft 365, communicate and share information effectively. “Our engineering teams alone update more than 50 different products every day, and we need to make sure that our customers hear about the changes that they care about,” explains Melinda Jackson, Principal Program Manager – Microsoft 365 Customer Experience Team at Microsoft. 

The engineering and product marketing teams partner to create and update upcoming feature communications in their own Azure DevOps instances, and our engineering systems sync the data into Azure DevOps, where Power Automate workflows are used to drive quality and operational integrity. These workflows are updated frequently in a no-code manner, even as new products come online to the roadmap. “We’ve aggregated disparate systems and enabled discoverability for our marketing, content, and other internal teams without actually doing any complex development,” says Jackson. 

Submission of new features initiates a process whereby the customer experience roadmap operations team works with product managers and product marketing stakeholders to validate the content and timing and provide additional guidance on the change communication process. Key to delivering timely, complete, accurate, and useful feature information to change management stakeholders is that nothing goes public without manual intervention by designated marketing and engineering owners. 

The customer experience team uses Power BI data visualizations to better understand which Microsoft product teams are delivering new roadmap information. “Using Power BI, I can check all the entries that I’m going to publish on the roadmap that day to check if any of them are missing material,” says Jackson. The team can then create flexible business rules to view data, review feature communications, and make decisions prior to publishing. Additionally, the team can easily expose roadmap data to the right users internally with Power BI permissions. 

To help engineering and marketing teams understand the policies and processes around what needs to go on the public roadmap and how, the customer experience team uses an internal SharePoint site that’s dedicated to all Microsoft 365 change communications. It provides a separate SharePoint site to service field sales and marketing. While most teams use automated database syncing to submit roadmap feature information, others submit change requests using Microsoft Forms to add feature information to Microsoft Lists that also resides on SharePoint sites. The customer experience team uses Power Automate to send notifications and approvals, and the workflow follows a similar path from there. 

The team processes roadmap data and uses an internally developed REST API to publish it to the public roadmap. In addition to publication on the public roadmap, engineering and product marketing owners deliver targeted messages that allow Microsoft 365 admins to track new and updated features in the Microsoft 365 Message center. The Message center complements the public roadmap and offers Microsoft admins an in-app experience to receive official service announcements, feature changes, and more.

Keeping the roadmap organized and current

The Microsoft 365 public roadmap team has significant engineering support to help orchestrate the systems and processes, but all of it is managed day-to-day through Microsoft 365 products. This interoperability allows the Microsoft 365 team to pull together the full picture of all product features published and released in any given period, and the team can keep roadmap data organized and current for customer use and planning without heavy developer resources. 

With a large and diverse set of product organizations using multiple systems, and as the volume of roadmap items continues to grow, the Microsoft 365 team is continuing to focus on improving the customer change management experience through careful customer consideration and increased process automation. This guidance about new and upcoming features in more than 50 different Microsoft 365 products helps customers gain insights, participate in the process, and move forward with confidence. 

Facilitating better communication, customer support, and feedback channels

As part of the change communications program, Microsoft wants to offer maximum transparency when rolling out any update, change, product, service, or feature that’s important for customer consideration, whether that customer is a commercial enterprise, small or midsize business, or government entity. With Microsoft releasing so many features and services every day, hundreds of changes might be sent to customers daily, so finding the delicate balance between overwhelming customers and giving them time to prepare for changes is important. “Customers want to know what changes are coming and when,” says Jackson. “If we’re adding a new transcription service to Microsoft 365, customers might be concerned about things like compliance, information privacy, and training. Delivering useful, targeted, and timely product roadmap information is both an art and a science. Our change communication process aims to bridge this gap.” 

Because every change is intended to improve customers’ experiences, Microsoft encourages customers to test and provide feedback on updates before rolling them out for general availability. Customers can submit feedback directly on the Microsoft 365 roadmap site or in response to notifications sent in the filterable Message center in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Roadmap feedback is then analyzed by the roadmap team and sent to a centralized database where it’s reviewed by the product manager, program manager, and product marketing manager who own that feature, among other roles and teams. “We take customer input extremely seriously and drive our scorecards and metrics with it,” says Jackson. “Sometimes features and the communications around them have been pulled back to the drawing board and changed almost instantaneously as a result.”

Paving the path for customers to enable their own change

With the Microsoft 365 public roadmap, Microsoft built a streamlined process for innovation and product development, and it coordinated the roadmap as a resource to help customers prepare for change and offer feedback. “We usually can’t tell customers who are in the cloud exactly when updates will release, so we provide the Microsoft 365 public roadmap to help them prepare,” says Jackson.

Although Microsoft designed the roadmap to support its fast-moving customers, every organization, regardless of size or industry, strives to build a more resilient future by improving visibility and predictability, identifying roadblocks, and better responding to change—both internally and while working with customers. Jackson’s advice to organizations that want to align their change management with the Microsoft 365 public roadmap or develop their own roadmap is the same guidance Microsoft has followed since day one. “Use agile, user-friendly tools like Power Automate, Microsoft Lists, and Forms because you can prototype and correct faster with them than you can with deep development,” she suggests. “After you’ve determined the information that you want, make sure that you’re always able to mine it in Power BI because to drive improvement, you need to be able to measure what you’re doing.” 

Any organization can take inspiration from the Microsoft 365 public roadmap as a model for bringing new services to internal users or to market, removing much of the uncertainty and complexity from IT change in the process. Jackson adds, “By coordinating your organization’s transformation with a roadmap of your own, you can avoid hazards, prepare for detours, and find valuable shortcuts on your journey to modernization and perseverance in the cloud, all while being better prepared for change at every step of the journey.” 

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