Emily Kirby George: [00:00:00] We've all been using Copilot and Intelligent Recap and a lot of the meetings experiences, which there is the pre, during, and post life cycle. When you think about calling, it's, you're picking up the phone. It's not something on the calendar that's scheduled that you'll have those artifacts. So we're very Intentionally designing around that life cycle.

Tom Arbuthnot: Welcome back to the Empowering Cloud podcast. This week, we have Emily Kirby George, who is a senior product manager in Microsoft Teams engineering, looking after some of the calling features. Emily gives us a really interesting perspective on what it's like to be a product manager, particularly inside Teams Phone and calling.

Emily actually came up through the support organization, supporting Skype for Business and actually helping internally at Microsoft with the Teams migration as well. We get a really good perspective from her and her journey, and also talk about Teams phone, the [00:01:00] importance of phone, and kind of the importance of both the fundamentals and some of the exciting new features that are coming down the pipe.

Many thanks to Emily for taking the time to jump on the show, really appreciate it. And also many thanks to Logitech who are this podcast sponsors, really appreciate their support of Empowering Cloud. On with the show. Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. Excited to talk to somebody recently joined the product group on the calling side, but has a really interesting history in our space.

So, Emily, welcome to the show. If you want to introduce yourself. 

Emily Kirby George: Sure. Thanks, Tom. Hi, folks. My name is Emily Kirby George, and I am a senior product manager here on the Teams calling team, and I'm excited to chat today. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Thanks for making the time. Really appreciate it. So you've got a really interesting kind of journey into the products manager role.

I can't remember when we first met, but it was probably a little while ago now. But maybe you could tell us a little bit about the [00:02:00] journey and where you started with Microsoft and with Teams. 

Emily Kirby George: Sure. So I started, it was, it'll be nine years ago, next year, um, about eight and a half years in our product support organization, I was supporting Skype for Business, um, hybrid and online.

So I think is The role that I'm most thankful that I've had because it was a great grounding for the roles that I've had since then. And as part of that, I started supporting in beta what is now Microsoft Teams. So that kind of was the foot into the Teams journey. From support, I went and joined our internal IT organization, Microsoft IT, as part of the initiative to roll out Teams to Microsoft.[00:03:00] 

Um, so all of the side by side and islands mode, uh, times, that was, uh. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Slightly messy early days. Yes. We were all still in love with Skype for Business and Teams was the new kid on the block. It's hard to think back that far now. 

Emily Kirby George: It is, and some of the things that, you know, we would have to do, we would have to tell our employees to do and then ourselves do, like, where do I take a meeting and where do my calls come in?

So, yeah, you think back and, um, Long gone are the days, but, um, yeah, it was a great view of, hey, an enterprise at scale. This is how they have to consume these sorts of changes. So if we're going to have our customers do it, let's, you know, Be able to tell the tale, um, 

Tom Arbuthnot: and for people listening Microsoft kind of live on the right on the edge internally.

So things go kind of through the tap rings in the early access and then Microsoft production is [00:04:00] slightly before customer production. So it really, when you're dealing with internal deployments, it really is early days. 

Emily Kirby George: Yes, very much eating the dog food, uh, we say. So once that project was coming to an end and all of our users were for the most part on Teams, I joined the Teams Engineering Group, a special team called the Quality and Customer Obsession Group.

And so I think, uh, If I can think back, one of the places we probably met, Tom, was when I was doing the roadshow of, uh, Microsoft's migration. And then that's the team I, uh, ended up joining was the, the team that was taking all of our feedback and helping prioritize that. Like, hey, this is what Microsoft would need.

Um, that's a good sign that other organizations are going to need the same thing. Um, and that team was really all about, um, Focusing on keeping a high quality bar and obsessing over customers and ensuring that we were really [00:05:00] championing for the, um, for all of the users. And these are folks without account teams necessarily.

It's just people giving feedback. Um, and we were the ones internally voicing it. So. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. I love it when people come into product who've been on that kind of front line of support and have felt the pain and the challenges if things aren't working right, or just the various requirements that customers have.

I mean, Microsoft Teams is such a big product, 320 million monthly active users. There's all types of users, all types of customers, all types of verticals. It is incredibly diverse. 

Emily Kirby George: It really is. And I think some of the perspectives that I still take with me today is, especially during COVID, um, I was responsible for the meetings area and representing all of the different, um, all of the issues and requests and feedback on [00:06:00] meetings.

And there was, I remember one piece of feedback. It was, uh, I think a psychiatrist and he said, I'm trying to meet with my patients and I can't, and I'm having a lot of trouble. And. You know, we, a lot of times just the nature of our business and the legacy, you're thinking enterprise. And so being able to switch and say, oh, you know, that psychiatrist and.

I forget, you know, what state it was and thinking about them when we're making these decisions. Um, you know, always we have a very diverse customer base, whether or not, um, we design for them, it doesn't always have the customer names next to it. So we have to account for it as well. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I mean, it definitely feels like obviously Microsoft have a massive base in the enterprise, and it feels like that's, that's the default just because of the mass, but then there's this incredibly interesting challenge you have in product of designing for [00:07:00] enterprises that want a policy and a toggle for everything and then designing for a 20 user org that just basically just wants it to work. It doesn't really want a toggle or a button for anything, and you've got everything in between. Exactly. 

Emily Kirby George: Exactly. Right. And especially now that I'm in the calling space, um, that's even more highlighted with the complexity of, of phone and different deployments.

And, uh, you know, these customers and enterprises have had. They have these huge deployments and they've had a lot of different, um, uh, solutions that they've used. And so accounting for that while also the people who just want it to work, they just want to make a phone call. 

Tom Arbuthnot: I think porting is a really interesting space to be in.

So as you say, there's some really. Esoteric requirements in there and we're at the 20 plus million monthly active users now, so it's a good good base there, but there's there's a lot more out [00:08:00] there still on traditional phone systems, legacy phone systems, other platforms. Um, talk to us a little bit, I guess, how does that even work internally in terms of features and prioritization?

I know you recently had some features announced at Ignite as well, which were, you know, things that some people might think are smaller features, but they're so important to so many customers. 

Emily Kirby George: Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's really, we have to put on a different lens or look through a different lens when we're prioritizing our features because we have that, um, legacy.

Experience that we need to maintain while also keeping up and, um, even getting ahead of in the intelligence space. I mean, Ignite Copilot was on the forefront of everything. But when you think something like a phone number, um, we have to really Maintain both of those pillars and bring them together as well.

I, yeah, the feature that, um, [00:09:00] just shipped, we, um, we were chatting, it's Delayed Simultaneous Ring, which, great, it's out, it's nothing really fancy, but for the people who need it, the ability to say, hey, wait to, to ring the rest of my call group, 15 seconds. It really makes or breaks that experience for them.

There was a ton of feedback from really large names saying that it was You know, they had dollar signs with the disruption and the loss of productivity with their phones. As soon as the phone would ring, it rings everybody. And, you know, there's no AI in that. It, but it has this tangible, um, uh, productivity boost by, by shipping it.

And it was just a long tail feature that we were able to get out. Um, and then things like Q Zap, which we have. now a ground for intelligence to build on that at [00:10:00] some point. So it's, um, designing for the, the future as well as not forgetting some of the basics. 

Tom Arbuthnot: It's a really interesting tension, isn't it? It's like we can invest cycles in, in this traditional feature that maybe hundreds of thousands of users have.

And I think the thing that gets missed sometimes with additional features is it's not going to go out to all 20 million users to be used, but the subset it is, will unlock a customer to move their organization and they won't move until this piece works or this piece works very often. 

Emily Kirby George: Yes, exactly.

There were several customers who were unlocked by that one feature. So perfect example. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. So how, how, as much as you can say, obviously, how does that feature list gets prioritized? Because I, there must be a huge, Potential list of features in, in, in calling both in like ways you can innovate into the new world of AI and traditional features you could, you know, replicate [00:11:00] in, in Teams.

How does that decision process work? 

Emily Kirby George: It is. As much an art as a science. And, you know, we, we just finished planning for next semester. So the first half of 2025, and it was my first real planning, um, because when I joined the team, it was, um, the end of March. And so I joined right when planning was happening.

And I was, you know, thrown into the fire and was just trying to not get burned. But this was the first real, um, time when I was, you know, had to make some decisions and, um, you know, be part of the, all of the fun and it's hard. I really, um, you know, respect the level of intention that our leadership puts in to making the decisions, because a lot of them are very difficult.

Um, there's some [00:12:00] Uh, we call them hard cuts. So either it's going to make it or it's a hard cut and it, it, those cuts, they're hard when it's something that, um, You know, we try not to get too attached to what, what you're working on because it can be cut at any time, but for the customers who are waiting for it, we want to get those things out.

I'd say that at this point, um, really, the focus is fundamentals, and it has been for quite some time now, just You know, getting the table stakes solid and then once those are there, AI intelligence, um, how can we modernize the business? And then the remaining is, um, like Delayed Simul Ring, really that, that long tail and continuing to round out the feature set.

So it kind of high level. Those are the, the three pillars. 

Tom Arbuthnot: I love hearing fundamentals, like it doesn't unfortunately doesn't [00:13:00] win any headlines and it doesn't get Wall Street excited, but it's like it's so so important, even more so in phone. I know loads went in, you know, kind of in the last few semesters around just Teams client and stability and speed and tenant switching and the new client and like it's hard to like, there's, there's the new client has gone amazingly well.

I mean, that's switching hundreds of billions of users to a new, completely new client. And there wasn't really any big challenges that I saw externally, which is just amazing. 

Emily Kirby George: It was really monumental. And, you know, to say it took a village is an understatement. And it's it's pretty remarkable with. I mean, the the loads of planning that went in that it really did pay off and that you're able to say, um, you know, from your, uh, very well, um, versed perception and exposure to, uh, the industry that you're able to say that.

So. [00:14:00] It's good on the team. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, you know, definitely a lot of credit to the team there. So let's talk that, that kind of futures of phone and AI. So, I mean, Ignite, there was some, some announcements around kind of further extensibility of, of Teams phone and, and you've, you've got to be thinking about AI capabilities.

What, what are you thinking there? Because there's quite a lot there, isn't there? 

Emily Kirby George: There is. And a lot of what we're doing is Really trying to understand what specific to phone and the phone workflows, um, we've all been using Copilot and Intelligent Recap and a lot of the meetings experiences, which there is the pre, during and post life cycle.

When you think about calling, it's, you're Picking up the phone. You're not, uh, you know, it's not something on the calendar that's that's scheduled that you'll have those artifacts. [00:15:00] So we're very, um, intentionally designing around that, that life cycle, um, and not just trying to copy and paste and just, you know, You know, put AI wherever there's a, a surface, we are thinking a lot about the future in, um, B2B and, you know, with Q's app, how can we bring service intelligence there for productivity and Q performance as well as, um, customers.

So these are a lot of, um, things that we're thinking about for the future, um, to round out, uh, the investments that we're currently. delivering on. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it's reassuring to hear that we're not just copy pasting AI into any feature because it definitely feels like there's a lot of push to get AI in and it's being thought through.

I hadn't really thought about that so consciously until we had our prep call and you were saying like, It really makes sense, actually, that the meeting recap intelligent [00:16:00] meeting recap, you know the intent of the meeting, you know what's happening, you're summarizing it. Calling is quite different, isn't it?

The potential there, I think, is more around pulling information into that session, maybe phone numbers, so you know who's calling, you know the call's happening, but you know who it is. And then the CRM integration. Like, I think everybody's right on the cusp of it now, but I think everybody's dying for like auto transcribed goes into the CRM.

Like, that's been a dream for years and years. 

Emily Kirby George: Exactly, exactly. Those are the exact sorts of things we're thinking about. Um, you know, when you're late for a meeting, recap the last five minutes. You won't. Have that in a call, right? Um, likely unless you, uh, weren't paying attention. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Unless you really weren't paying attention 

Emily Kirby George: yeah, yeah. Um, but the hope is that, um, yeah, we're unlocking, um, new intelligence avenues, um, versus plugging, [00:17:00] um, ones that we, we could plug, but don't serve the need quite as, quite as much.

So yeah, there's a lot of opportunity that we're, we're thinking about. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's really exciting. And I was really excited to hear about the extensibility. It feels like again, it's funny, like back in the Lync and Skype days, you know, we had that kind of CBP story and it's like, it's, it's now turbocharged with AI because suddenly it's like, Oh, you could actually take the media stream and do stuff with it, which we never could have done, you know, a decade ago.

Emily Kirby George: Exactly. Exactly. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. 

So, like, going back to the fundamentals, the last thing I wanted to touch on is that there's been a lot of work done around the kind of availability as well, hasn't there? The service went up to five nines and the SBA work's been done recently about the kind of seven day token.

Um, it feels like you've said it, but I just want to be clear, like, there's a A lot of work in the not sexy features that is [00:18:00] really important to customers. 

Emily Kirby George: It 

is. The majority of the work that our team is doing is on the, the non shiny, sexy, you know, headline making features, but it's the ones that at the end of the day, if we haven't done those investments, you know, we have nothing to, to stand on.

So, um, And again, going back to those hard cuts when we have the, the shiny new opportunities of AI, you know, those are where the, the, it's a difficult decision to say, hey, no, we, we have to focus on the fundamentals.

Because AI stuff, it's fun and custom, you know, everyone gets excited and you know, you, you want to, but, um, so yeah, it's, it's something that our team has, you know, we, like I said, just did the planning and when you can visualize the hours of work, the fundamentals bucket was very, very, very full on that, on that visual.

So., we take it seriously. 

Tom Arbuthnot: [00:19:00] Yeah, and it's great to understand, yeah, it's great to understand on that list of features as well that like it's a, it's a hard decision. Like very often you see people who are kind of far removed from Microsoft. It's like it's so obvious this feature needs to be done. And it's like there's, there's almost a feeling if they don't know how it works, like, well, how could Microsoft not see this gap needs closing?

And it's not not a lack of, understanding very often. It's just hard, hard choices to be made. I guess you see that from the inside now because you've gone up through support. So you must have, maybe I'm putting words in your mouth, but you must have hit support issues where you're like, how is this not hit the top of the list yet?

Emily Kirby George: Absolutely. I mean, even my most recent role and it, it's kind of, uh, hindsight is always 2020 and I'm, you know, I'm a few years in now, you know, eight years and it's. It's interesting that I'm just having those, uh, you know, lights switch on that I get why, why this [00:20:00] feature hasn't happened yet. Um, when, yeah, no, you put words in my mouth, but spot on, you know, I would sit there and be like, why hasn't this happened?

There's so many asks or on user voice, it's number one, you know, just do it already. But it's, it's really not that simple. And it's not a, they're not decisions that are taken lightly for sure. 

Tom Arbuthnot: And the cross, the cross team dependencies is the other fun one. It's like, well, like this needs fixing. Oh, well, it depends on this and this and this and this team and this team.

Emily Kirby George: Yeah. And I, I really didn't understand that either. I mean, you hear, oh, dependencies. And I like, yeah, well, it's always easier said than done, especially on the outside. 

Tom Arbuthnot: You don't 

have to be together on a Teams call and make it happen, right? 

Emily Kirby George: Yeah, just figure it out. Just I'll talk and, you know, just sort it out.

But I, one of my features that I have, I have, there's, I think, seven or eight teams that all have to, really the stars have to align because not only, they all have their own priorities and then taking, [00:21:00] it's, um, it's a complex, uh, dance. To make it happen. But some it does. I mean, I think the biggest and best example is, uh, the new Teams that client that came out.

That was, um, the North Star. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's 

basically everybody, isn't it? 

Emily Kirby George: Exactly. 

Yeah. So. While keeping the other thing up and running. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah, awesome. Emily, thanks for giving us that perspective. Really excited for you being in product. And I'm really, yes, I'm really excited to meet somebody that's been up through the, through the Skype world and through the support and the customer facing side is, is in making calling decisions.

It's really reassuring. So thanks for taking the time. 

Emily Kirby George: Thank you, Tom. Yeah, thanks for having me. 

Tom Arbuthnot: I appreciate it. We'll get you back in maybe when you're at your semester or two ends and you've got some new features to talk about. We can, we can talk about them on the show. 

Yeah, I'm sure I'll have a few more lights go off and my perspective from today will even [00:22:00] be changed.

Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. Awesome. Thanks so much. 

Emily Kirby George: Great.