First Stint with a Customer

At this very moment, one of our internal customers, Gary, is using our newly launched product on his laptop in my office. One of my coworkers is here, too, helping him.

Our product has two websites, one a customer-facing site (that is, at connect.microsoft.com for people participating in our Beta programs) and the other an administration site for internal people to set up those programs and the content that will appear on the site.

Preparing for v1.0, our team set the site that is presented to customers as the highest priority. That meant that as we got close to delivering, if we saw a problem with the customer site we fixed it, if we saw a problem with the administration site, we usually let it go to a future version. So, the internal site has a lot of open issues.

Now, Gary's using this for the first time as the first person to use our administration site. While he does stop occasionally to say we have done a great job overall, as he's trying stuff, he's also rolling his eyes, groaning, and giving endless ideas on how we can improve it. It's pretty entertaining, pretty illuminating, and generally a great time finding out just how hard it is to please a customer, especially a Microsoft employee.