Office is a 150-billion-dollar organization, yet they had never had a marketing department dedicated to it’s products. All brand and marketing work was done through a centralized marketing organization that was focused on the overall Microsoft Corporate brand and product portfolio. Faced with the need to compete against products like Google docs, Microsoft invested in building it’s first brand and marketing division dedicated to the Office Suite of digital products. A GM was hired, who brought in an executive Creative Director. The ECD hired me as the Studio Manager/Associate Creative Director (contractor) to help him build a creative design studio from scratch; with me providing the business plan, studio operational processes, approach and evangelism, road maps, staging, hiring designers, on-boarding and relationship building across the Office organization. Prior to the Office Brand Strategy team; product marketers were doing mostly business to business sales. They were suddenly expected to create consumer facing marketed and advertising solutions. That is where the creative studio came in.

 Problem Situation

Across the organization there was a need for a product UI and feature screen delivery process that would make readily available high-resolution assets for use in marketing and advertising that were consistent with the build as well as be available in a file format that could be animated. Prior to identifying the gap; we would go directly to the product design team requesting specific feature screens and receive files in all manner of possible delivery types. The product teams were working fast and across the various product teams using different software solutions to create their solutions. They were creating digital customer experiences so of course their files were not in a high-resolution print quality. That meant we couldn’t use their native files to solve for our high-resolution needs; but their files did give us a visual representation of the current build. At the same time I learned that the Product Marketing team was creating advertising and marketing moments so I met with their team to learn how they were obtaining their screens for their various uses. I was looking for a benchmark or perhaps a way for our two groups to not duplicate effort. I learned that their system; while adequate for the work they were doing with their business to business customers, was not of the high quality we were expected to be producing for our direct to consumer efforts. For many of their marketing efforts they were doing low resolution screen shots.

 Solution

I recommended that we build out an additional part of the Office Brand Creative Studio to include a small production studio; specializing in the recreation of high resolution product UI screens. Based on the number of products and the upcoming year’s product marketing road map I was able to calculate the number of product screens and feature screens we would need in time for each upcoming marketing moment. That gave me the information I needed to build out a business case for hiring 3 production designers and one producer who would focus on this work exclusively. I proposed a budget, a phased timeline and requested the budget for the following fiscal year. We were granted the appropriate approvals and began hiring immediately. By having a dedicated team re-create current product builds and feature screens we were able to 1) build a consistent library of screens across all of the platforms that were supported in high resolution; allowing a $1M product marketing campaign to be turned around quickly increasing product sales for the launch of the new feature; 2) improve consistent screen shot practices for low resolution screens and 3) free up product design and engineer teams from doing time consuming work that interrupted their digital workflow improving their speed to market and saving over $260k in man hours. The new process also ensured a consistent brand experience and product truthfulness by having up to date screens available on demand.