The Submit Feedback screen in Excel with smiley and frowny faces.

Behind the Scenes: Leveraging customer feedback for feature development with Excel Program Manager Steve Kraynak

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As Office Insiders, many of you have no doubt taken the opportunity to submit feedback about your experience with an Office app—whether it was something you liked or something you felt could be improved. (We love to get both kinds of input!)

But have you ever wondered exactly what happens to that feedback after you send it in? How do Microsoft program managers and engineers use your input to help refine and improve the Office products that you love and rely on?

To get the “inside” scoop on how user feedback impacts Office, we spoke with Steve Kraynak, a Senior Program Manager on the Excel team (and frequent contributor to this blog).

Steve KraynakSteve Kraynak

What’s your experience been like with Office Insiders?

Steve: I love the Office Insider program for several reasons, the main one being the feedback we get from this key group of customers. I’ve been focused on Excel for Mac for the past four years, and I’ve leveraged Insider feedback in my work daily. We’ve done a lot of work to make Excel on the Mac better. It’s not just one feature, it’s the whole app and user experience—and our Insiders have been very active and very engaged.

How do you go about accessing Insider feedback?

On the Mac team, we try to read every single piece of Insider feedback that we get. We have daily emails that aggregate the feedback we’ve received from Insiders on Mac. Every morning, I review the list and decide what action to take on each one.

We specifically focus on feedback from Insiders because they help us identify issues that need to be addressed before the feature reaches a broader audience. Also, the volume of feedback is small enough that we can actually look at all of it and deal with it.

What are some specific actions you might take, based on the feedback you get?

There are a number of ways that we react to the feedback we see each day. Some of the feedback items are feature requests, which we log to track what kinds of features people are looking for. Other items could be about a problem the user is having, and we can offer advice or a solution, if one already exists.

There are also issues reported through feedback that turn out to be a bug that the user has discovered. These get logged, investigated, and prioritized so we can continually improve the quality of Excel. Often, if we need more information, we’ll reach out to the person who submitted the feedback to get additional details. The Insiders are particularly helpful in these cases.

Steve Kraynak and other Microsoft employees at the Giving Campaign 5K race.At Microsoft, we’re always super excited to get your feedback!

Can you think of a time when a customer made a big difference through their feedback?

There is definitely one that comes to mind. The issues that were raised by this Insider were quite tricky, since they had to do with the app performance. That’s something that can be impacted by so many things that have nothing to do with the app itself, so we really have to do some digging before we can start working on solutions.

So I reached out to the person who provided the feedback, to learn more about their work environment. They worked for a large accounting firm, and they had quite a list of challenges that needed addressing—some of them we already knew about, and some were new to us. I brought a few engineers into the conversation and we got to work.

We partnered with this customer for almost two years. Over that time, we checked in regularly as we worked through their list of issues. When we reached the end of the list, we celebrated and agreed to stay in touch. That was really satisfying.

Is there a specific Excel fix or feature that you’re particularly proud of?

I have to go with a recent one and that’s the smooth scrolling feature, which we wrote a blog post about. We got a lot of feedback about that over the years, and it was a really complex problem.

When we finally released the blog post announcing the fix, I think one of the responses that really hit me was someone who said, “Hey, I’ve only had this for a day, and I can’t believe I’ve lived with this issue for all the 20 years I’ve been using Excel.” This type of verbatim feedback is incredibly rewarding and very motivational.

GIF demonstrating the smooth scrolling improvements for large cells in Excel for Windows.

What’s one thing you’d like our audience to take away from this article about the feedback process?

I’d just emphasize that there are real people here at Microsoft, and we actually read the comments and feedback. You know, sometimes we hear from people who make it very clear they are really unhappy about something with the product. And one of the things I love doing is responding and just sticking to the facts; I focus on the issue they’re having, rather than the tone or language they’re using.

It’s not unusual for these people to come back to me, after a back-and-forth exchange, and actually apologize, because they realize that I do care about their feedback and their experience. And that’s really great.

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