Today I spent several hours meetings.  This is a common occurrence for me but today was a little different.  The meetings were about Quality, Community, Accountability and value proposition, pretty standard topics around here and generally the thinking around these topics has been focused on better engineering for some time now.  However, positive change seems to be afoot as the customer was at the heart of the all new initiatives that were proposed.  The themes were;

 

Quality - Drive quality into the planning and design phase of our product cycle and allow customers to validate our plans.

 

Community - Drive developers, testers and PMs into the community so that we can not only help our customers but learn from them as well.

 

Value Proposition - Ensure that the marketing value proposition is understood and accepted by the customer and the development teams.

 

Accountability - We are accountable to our customers.

 

I don't know what will happen with some of these initiatives (except community cause my teams owns this for Windows Server) but its great to see that we are serious about taking customer focus to the next level.