Community Building, Communities in Teams, and Laurie Pottmeyer

Announced in December 2022, Communities in Microsoft Teams is a new experience within the newest version of Teams Free, which, as the name suggests, is geared towards people who may not have a paid version of Teams through work or their own. The goal of Communities in Teams is to “enable people to come together, connect, share, and collaborate.” Examples of these community collaborations might be a group of friends to plan a fishing trip, members of a team in a bowling league or members of a local user group. This free version of Teams provides the essential tools you need for building community, including persistent chat, a calendar, and the ability to schedule and join video meetings.

If you’re interested in trying out Communities in Teams, click here. Microsoft has even created a feedback portal specifically for this new release.

In a recent Twitter-based community conversation (the monthly #CollabTalk tweetjam), we discussed the topic of community-building best practices, sharing our collective insights into what it takes to start, grow, and make resilient our various community efforts. Participating in this online discussion was Laurie Pottmeyer (@LauriePottmeyer), Senior Product Manager and Community Lead with Microsoft Teams engineering, who shared some of her own insights and experiences on community-building, as well as some examples on how she plans to incorporate this new free version of Teams into her personal life.

Check out the video, or read through the (lightly edited) transcript of our conversation below!

Christian Buckley

Hello. I'm joined today by Laurie Pottmeyer, a senior product manager and community lead for Microsoft Teams engineering. Laurie, thanks for joining me today.

Laurie Pottmeyer

Thanks for having me, Christian.

Christian

Well, this is a great topic. It's really two topics in one today, a blend of community and product. So, for the January CollabTalk TweetJam, we discussed the topic of the new Communities in Teams. So, we're going to talk about that—the product side—as well as the broader topic of the science behind building community. So, you're also involved in community, that aspect of it. It's great to have you. So, your job—what do you do at Microsoft?

Laurie

Well, as Community Lead for Microsoft Teams, I actually sit within the engineering team, which is really cool. I think Teams is unique in that way, and that we put such an emphasis on community and being customer driven. And so, I'm really lucky that I have executive support from within our own team to really focus on that. And so, I look after the MVP program, I work with the Regional Directors to some extent and I work with the Microsoft Tech community, the MTC as you may know it, online which is our virtual community, and I work with a lot of the user groups and community events all around the world.

Christian

I think this is great to get your perspective on this, and I want you to answer these from your role, not thinking, “Well how would I answer this from a community standpoint?” So the first question is: How has involvement in the community impacted you personally and professionally?

Laurie

Well, I started at Microsoft 19 years ago as a contractor and then a year later I was an FTE, a full-time employee. And so, it's been a while, and I think for the first 10 years, maybe even more, I didn't even know about the whole tech community. I remember back in the day I was a recruiter for a short time and I used to go to user groups just to, you know, meet people, as recruiters do. And you know what, I really didn't know from just the Microsoft side of things, how big the community was, until I started working for Skype for Business and was in charge of rolling out the tech community for Skype for Business. And that's kind of when I started to interact with people like Anna Chua at Microsoft. She was really involved with the MTC, getting that kicked off the ground and, you know, has been involved with Ignite. And I remember she came to me one time and said, “Who's in charge of the MVPs at Microsoft, or for Microsoft Teams in Skype for Business? And I was like, “I don't even know what you're talking about.” And that work of working with the MVPs was kind of my first taste in the community. And from there I started learning about the user groups and the community events and learning who all of you were. And I was like, wow, I had no idea. And since that time, and that was probably six-seven years ago, I've made phenomenal friends. I've gotten to travel. I feel like I could go anywhere in the world and I could pick up the phone, pick up Teams and say I'm coming to a city near you. And I would have an instant tour guide, somebody that could show me around, show me all the good places to go. And, you know, in some cases I've met people's families and it’s just—there’s a personal connection. I think we'll probably talk about that in future questions. Yeah, it just means so much when you can build that personal connection. Then when you get into a situation where you need to ask somebody a work question, you need to fix a problem or solve an issue, you can go to those people and they're your friends, and that's been huge.

Christian

I may not know the answer, but I know somebody who knows the answer.

Laurie

Right. Right.

Christian

And I don't know if this has happened to you, but it's happened to me, like, a dozen times where I'm at an airport somewhere in the world. This has happened internationally, not just in the US, and I've come across somebody that I know. Now, you think about it, the chance that I'm traveling to or from an event and see somebody that is in this field and also going to that event, that kind of increases it. But a couple of them have been on random vacation travels, like I was going to Iceland with my son and ran into a SharePoint person at Detroit at the airport.

Laurie

I know Holly Lehman, who's on the Teams marketing team. She was on vacation to Croatia with her husband and they ran into Jason Wynn and his wife who, they had just gotten married, and he's from the UK, Holly's from the US and they met in the airport in Croatia, both on vacation. It's such a small world.

Christian

Yes, it is. So, my next question: What are the key components of building a successful community, and why?

Laurie

Oh gosh, there's so many great people that have talked about this, and I've done a ton of reading on it. I think really it just boils down to communicating openly and honestly and really building a connection with people. Nobody likes to walk into a room, and I say room, but I'm talking about a Teams channel or a website or a physical room, with nobody in there. So you want to go to where the people are and where there's activity. You don't want to show up and stand in a room by yourself. And so, open communication and being transparent, letting people know what you need, letting people know the struggles that you're having and just being human, I think sets a really good foundation for having an active community. Once people have trust in each other, they open up and they aren't afraid to ask for help and aren't afraid to put themselves out there. But I think regular communication is really important, just to keep things going, keep things fresh and let people know there's always more information or there's always people here. It's not just going to turn stagnant; people want don't want to go there when it's like that.

Christian

I would say consistency is, and I think you kind of addressed it—regular communication—that's part of it. But also, if you're running a user group, it's not moving locations, making it a regular time or regular location, locking those things down. Because when people can't find it, people that may have attended a session the previous month but can't find it, whether online or in-person. And so being as consistent as you can. I realize that with a user group, sometimes you’ve got to move around. Via Teams now, being able to have that collaborative sense where you're talking about what's happening with the group is so important, because if people don't feel like they can have a voice within that, then they're not going to feel connected.

Laurie

Right. Or don't know where to find the information. Where is it? Where do I go? You know, making it easy for people to join, not having too many roadblocks in the way. Do I have to click somewhere 18 times or do a search to find where something is? Or is it easily on my calendar, easily in an app or easy to find, easy to join?

Christian

Well, one topic that I love talking about, writing about, goes back to when I was a project manager. So, 20 plus years ago was a long time ago, but we would talk about all the time, trying to find—aligning—the executive, the managers, the information workers around a shared sense of purpose. What are we working on? What are the goals? I always say that you have to have that shared sense of purpose. That's what community is.

Laurie

Right.

Christian

So the next question is, how important is it to have that shared purpose within the community, and how often should you review, assess and potentially redirect that community purpose?

Laurie

Yeah, I think it depends on the community that you're driving. But I think that people drive the community, right? That's what creates communities, having that shared passion. So, it may be a specific technology that people are passionate about that they want to learn more about that maybe they're having an issue with and they want to go to experts to learn more. Or maybe somebody else had the issue that they had, so I think those things are what brings us together. But then once they're there, figuring out what's going to be beneficial to everybody, maybe somebody goes for the social aspect of the community. Maybe somebody else goes for the knowledge. And maybe somebody else goes to sell you. Maybe they're a partner, they're coming to sell you on their widget or their solution. And so, it kind of depends. I think everybody has different drivers for why they go and why they are part of a community certainly, but I think that that shared passion or shared topics are kind of what brings them all together. And I think it's OK for people to have different reasons. Maybe to answer your question about how often should you revisit what those things are: I think asking for regular feedback in any community is really important just to make sure that you're giving people what they want. Why are they there and why are they showing up? Is there something else that they're looking for? And maybe what they're looking for may not be what the group at large wants to offer. And that's OK. There's lots of different communities, lots of different things out there. But I think stating, here's why we're all collecting together, here's what this community is all about, this is what you should expect to get out of it. But then asking for regular feedback and making sure that the people who are part of that community are getting what they want and have a chance to contribute what's important to them as well. You know, we always say the more you give to community, the more you get out of it, and I think that's particularly important: to give people an opportunity to participate in whatever way that is useful and valuable to them.

Christian

This isn't really one of the questions that we talked about in the tweetjam, but I've heard a lot of people that are newer starting up and they're talking about the metrics and looking at the metrics for the user group, and I've always been very—for the community stuff—very soft on that line of thinking. Whether there's four people in the room or 400 people in the room with you, you can still have a fantastic event and great interaction and get value out of it for those four people. We could just “save that one life.” So it's not about the numbers, but it's about the quality of the interaction.

Laurie

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we say that at Microsoft a lot, right? We're very metric driven, as you can imagine. I know that, and we definitely do look at metrics, but it's not always about the number of people. If I look at the communities that I manage, there are some where, yes, the more we get in there, if you look at the Microsoft Tech Community, the more voices, the more people who are in there contributing, the faster we are able to respond to people and the more robust that community is, so that is true. At the same time, are the right people in there answering the questions? And for feedback sessions that I may do with MVPs, where we have MVPs come to talk to engineering, it's not always the best case to have 100 people there in that discussion. Sometimes it's two or three people just having really in-depth conversations that is most valuable. And I think that's true within a community, right? A user group could be five people getting together around a conference room at your office, you know, inviting people to come and share their stories, share their challenges. Or it could be 100 people on a full day. So it just depends, again, on what do people want to get out of it? And I think that the metrics piece of that is, sure, you can say I had five people or 500 people, but what are the people who are there saying about what they got out of it? And that's what is important to measure beyond just the number of people.

Christian

So, what are your best practices for developing a sense of belonging within community? And I know we discussed this at one point while I was at Microsoft, I was the Evangelist for the Management Excellence Community (MEC) and was part of the MEC. I'm sure you don't know what that is. Maybe you remember that and that was part of the Management Excellence Community, the MEC Leadership Team, which was MELT, because Microsoft loves the acronyms. I developed this little asset that did this 1-2-3 of 1) to always have a job, have a purpose, to participate actively; 2) to bring a friend, to always bring somebody, that's so important in community building—always find somebody. And then 3) always be learning, looking for those things and be open to learning other things. If you do those three things, you're going to feel like you belong within that community.

Laurie

Yeah, there's so many things that you just said there. One, how do you find people or how do you make it so that people feel like they're belonging is, offering a lot of different opportunities to engage. So, it may be having different people speak every month, or it may be having people volunteer for different jobs that need to take place, like helping to check in. What are people’s strengths, and offering opportunities for them to be engaged. As much or as little as they want. If they want to come and be a fly on the wall and just soak it in, that's fine too. But finding ways for people to participate in different ways I think is really important. And the other thing that goes along with that, instead of making a closed O, open it up and make it a U and just welcome people in. And that ties into bringing a friend. And I'm a huge advocate, I—believe it or not, I'm not a very outgoing person. And so I think…

Christian

We always talk about that. Oh, that Laurie…

Laurie

I know, it's true though. If I wasn't in this community role, just going by myself to a user group—I don't know if I would do it. And I mean, I’m just being transparent. I just don't know if I would do it. I am one of those people where I'm awkward so for me, going with a friend and having that person that I could lean on and then, you know, after attending and meeting people, then it's fine. But I think for a lot of people it is tricky, walking into a room with a bunch of people that you don't know. And you may have a shared passion, and you may be best friends after an hour, but that initial getting there and going into this unknown territory can be difficult for people. So I always think bringing a friend and, with that, two things: 1) if you're a presenter, I love the idea of people bringing a friend to present. And I say friend loosely, you know, a coworker or somebody else in the community, especially somebody that doesn't look like you or somebody that is newer to presenting and may not have the ability or the knowledge or the expertise to build something from scratch on their own, but who has a lot of knowledge and can help with demos and Q&A and maybe present some key slides.

Christian

Knowing that you are co-presenting with somebody... Because I love panels, a panel of four is perfect. That's the dream right there where—yeah, it's a conversation, but you build off each other around the topics. And you can do that when you're co-presenting. So if people are not reacting, if they're not asking questions—which is the worst, people, don't go there—but it's harder with pure online or hybrid. People are quiet online. They just want to blend into the background. But having a co-presenter…

Laurie

Well, you need to see the reaction…

Christian

But you can do that. You can play off each other. You could ask each other questions if things go quiet or just leverage each other's strengths.

Laurie

Yeah, totally. And one of the things that I love to do when I go to community events—and thank goodness we're able to start doing that again—it's to find young women who are in school in the field of technology—maybe not engineering school, but interested in tech—and introduce them to this concept of community. Because I think there's so few kids who are girls that are interested in tech. You know, I have a 14-year old daughter. If you ask her, the last option she'll choose is to be an engineer. But when you talk about, hey, there's a lot of different jobs in tech and there's such an opportunity there, and by the way, it doesn't mean that you're sitting behind a screen coding in a dark basement all by yourself all day, there's this concept of community that is really interesting. And I think that shows that there's a huge support system for women in tech, and that we need to absolutely grow, so that's kind of my “bring a friend along” is find a young woman that you know is looking into this field and show that there's more than just what you're learning in school.

Christian

That topic. I mean, my first involvement in community was back in the late ‘90s. I got involved with a completely different—I was in the IBM sector back then, but got involved working with rational software and the community aspects. I was invited several times to go and present on tech jobs for my marketing degree, and yet I've been in tech for 30 years. So I did something for UC Berkeley. I went and talked to a group of students that were in grad school on tech careers for non-tech people. This actually blends into the next question about, post-pandemic, that a lot of communities are struggling, user groups have kind of morphed and changed. And part of that is the technology that's changed. Like, the user group here in Utah was the Utah SharePoint user group and now it's just the broader Microsoft 365 user group. Where it used to be, you know, very specific for SharePoint, which is a broad topic as well. But, what does a community require to be resilient—to, long-term, finding people who have interest in technology or don't know that they have interest in technology yet, but bringing new people in and new perspectives is one way that you keep things fresh. And another way we talked about earlier is by constantly reviewing and looking at what are people interested in. Maybe people just want a pure networking thing. They don't want a formal presentation, to sit there and look at a screen. They just want to do an interaction, and so you can even change up the community. What are some of the ways that you keep those going?

Laurie

You know, I think one of the cool things about the pandemic—I mean, there's a handful of things, right? Not a lot, but we'll take a couple of things. I think one was that we saw the ability to be a part of communities from across the world. Maybe there are places that we travel to before, but because we were virtual, we got to be part of some of these regional communities that—we're able to do things virtually, and that's kind of cool. I think that's opened the door for people to cross-pollinate, so to speak, and be a part of these broader communities. But when you look at a lot of the in-person communities and how can people be successful, I think we're still in this transition time where we're getting back to normal, and I think people were so scaled back because they were forced to not go anywhere and do anything for so long. And now I think we're all kind of slowly coming out of that shell, and we want to get back to normal. We reset. I don't know if you're experiencing that, but everything seems very overwhelming to me. Like, these schedules, I can't even imagine going back to the schedule that I had pre-pandemic and I'm already getting there with kids’ schedule and work and, you know, just everything. It's like, oh, my God. How did I do this so far? Because we kind of had this reset.

Christian

My schedule really didn't change at all. I've been working remotely for, what, 12 years? But yeah, I understand conceptually what other people are going through.

Laurie

Yeah. Right, sure. Yeah. But I think it goes back to one of the first questions that you asked, having regular communication, letting people know what's going on. Be sure that people know what's going to take place. Having an agenda, and the agenda might shift. You know, you mentioned that there are some people that may come for the social thing and some that may be there for the content, want to hear the speaker, and some people don't want both. But being able to tell them, hey, the first hour is going to be networking, and then we're going to hear from speaker A and speaker B on these topics, and give people information so they know what to expect and they can time their day too, right? If they know that, oh, well, I've got to run kids here and there, I've got a meeting that's going to run late or something, but I know I can make it an hour. Well, if the first hour is social and you want to go and hear the speaker, then great. So I think just setting expectations, I guess is a good way to say it. And letting people know what the day is going to be like, or the evening or whatever the time is, but let people know what they're going to expect. And then I think having an opportunity for people to get involved, whether, again, volunteering, speaking, sharing experiences, maybe there could be a round-robin. I always think people like to hear other people's experiences. And though a deep dive on a topic is always good too, sometimes people just want to hear, like, what are you doing? And it can be a little bit more structured than having a happy hour or a networking hour where people are talking one-on-one. But it can be a panel, like you said, or just going around the room and sharing experiences. It could be on user adoption or whatever the topic is.

Christian

I wish more community user groups and other things would introduce or reintroduce… Hi, what do you do? Where do you work? And then one thing that very few people know about you? Doing something that's just interesting that starts conversations. I love that. And that was something that—I was co-founder and president for 3 1/2 years of the IAMCP Seattle chapter. So for those folks that don't know, that is the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners. And that was something that we would do. Every single time it started side conversations, they made time for that, made room for that. You’d go over something that they shared. I shared one time how I, when I was 18, I hitchhiked across the western US on my own (which I do not recommend).

Laurie

Oh my gosh.

Christian

Had some scary experiences on that, but I did it.

Laurie

Oh my gosh, I can't picture you doing that. That’s crazy.

Christian

I read the old ‘50s –‘60s book by Jack Kerouac called ‘On The Road’, the famous book. And what was great about it is that two or three people came up to me during the break and said, “I did something similar, and I read that book too when I was younger and had that kind of experience.” It was great.

Laurie

That is so much more comfortable than walking up to somebody and saying “Hi, what's your name? What do you do?” It's an automatic conversation starter for people who don't know what else to say other than “Where do you work? What do you do?” Because that can be uncomfortable for some people. I love that idea. I also think, related to the content, if people were able to say, what's your biggest frustration with X technology or what's your favorite feature in this product? Something related to the topic or the technology. If it's a user group or something like that, I think that can also start conversations like “Oh, you do what I do.” You know, you're in charge of compliance for whatever product it is. People start to get to know each other on that level too and be able to have those work conversations. But yeah, I think finding common ground is a great way for people to connect.

Christian

So first maybe tell us before we ask the question from the tweetjam… What is Communities in Teams, for folks that don't know about that announcement?

Laurie

There was recently a blog announcement on Teams Free explaining this is—you may have heard it referenced Teams for Home or Teams for Personal Use. Teams Free is the ability to use Teams in more of a personal environment, maybe with your family or a volunteer organization without having a license and having Teams through your work or school. So that's what Teams Free is. We've got a new blog on it. There's actually a discussion space in the Microsoft Tech Community also for people to ask questions and share their experiences too. So I urge people to check that out. But Communities in Teams is pretty cool, so I'm very excited. It's part of Teams Free. Right now, it's on mobile, and eventually we'll be coming to desktop. It takes multiple apps that you might be used to. If you have, you know, sporting organizations that you or your children are a part of, or a volunteer organization that you're part of, a board that you might be on, a bunco group. You know, just anything that—a book club—in your personal life that you may do where you have a group text today. Or it may be more structured where you have an app that you're tracking when practice is and sharing pictures—this takes all of those things that you might do with that organization or with that group of friends or people, family, and brings them together using Teams. So that's Communities in Teams. And you have the ability to share calendars, share invitations to things, view calendars. You can share photos with one another. You can have chats. There's this concept of persistent chat like you do with Teams for work or school, where you have this app on your phone. And it's super easy to switch between that and your work account also on mobile. So I'm really excited to see where it goes. And I'm excited to start using it with a couple of the organizations that I'm involved with too. Yeah.

Christian

So that's kind of the next question is, how will the new Communities in Teams feature fit into your personal or user group community development efforts? Because one of the biggest questions that I get is people saying, well, what's the story? How do they work? I've got my work Teams account and then I have this personal account. How will they work together? What's the thinking there? And how will you use them together?

Laurie

Yeah, well, there's a lot of things that you can do to make it easy for you to get notifications, by setting up your notifications. So if you don't want anything to come through on your work account, and your cell phone is used for personal stuff, and you're just going to occasionally check your work account, you can set up notifications in that way. Like I said, it's very easy to flip back and forth between the two using the mobile app. I'm excited to use it because I think right now I have so many different apps and they all do a piece of what Teams can do. So Communities in Teams, it's kind of like this Swiss Army Knife. We used to say Teams was the Swiss Army Knife for collaboration. It's not just chat, it's not just meetings, it's not just calling, it's not just files. It's everything all together and you have the ability to do all of this. And I think you can look at Communities in Teams that same way. You have the calendar, you have the messaging, you have the photos you can share links, you can do so much with it. And I think there's different apps that are out there today that do parts of this. But this enables us to do everything in a single app. And the nice thing is if you're already using teams for work or for school, now you've got this added bonus of having Communities in Teams without having to go to a whole other app.

Christian

Right. That's what's great is it's relatively easy to jump in between those things. So I've even started using that with some of my family members who are on another product. I mean, part of the problem is, as you described, I've got half a dozen different tools for different personal communities that they're jumping between. I think almost all of those people have Teams accounts. So we have that. But we're jumping on these other tools for these personal activities, group text rings and that kind of stuff. And this is much more social because you can continue with the chat or you can jump on a group video or break up and do one, but then share assets and things, files and photos and other things as well in that centralized location. And then it's persistent. So you don't lose it between the different tools and have it all in one place. But yeah, I think once people see that side by side they'll start thinking up, coming up with scenarios—and I think I even described it during the tweet jam, I think I mentioned you could have your fishing buddies and make your plans. I mean it's all of those things that any group of people that you would otherwise go and do via SMS, but you have these other tools. It's just a much more robust solution, and it's free, and it's the Team's environment, it's just a stream.. it's like a slimmed down version of the user interface, but it's familiar and you know how to use it.

Laurie

Yes, absolutely. And it's in preview, so there is the ability to hop on and check it out. Like I said, there's this space within the Microsoft Tech Community to ask questions and there's members of the product group that are in there on a regular daily basis monitoring that too. So, you know, we're at the very beginning stages. There's a lot for the team to work on and continue to grow and add new features. So we're definitely in a V1 right now but it's really exciting to see where it's going. I'm super excited myself.

Christian

Well, the final question for you—and I'm sure you talked to a lot of people about adoption and engagement—so what do you do to encourage non-work-related, outside of the Microsoft ecosystem traditionally, to encourage adoption and engagement?

Laurie

I missed the very beginning of that.

Christian

In Communities in Teams, so in this free version, what can people do to encourage adoption and engagement?

Laurie

Yeah, good question, because this is kind of agnostic to any tool really. You can show somebody any technology and all the cool stuff that it does all day long, but until you actually show them how it's going to work with what they're doing personally, and how it's going to change their life, they don't really get it, right? And so people need to see the technology in their actual use case. Like, this is what I do today using X technology. And here's how that same stuff is accomplished using Communities in Teams, or add whatever technology you want there, and show them: this is the time it's going to save, this is how much more collaborative we're going to be. Now we don't have to use these multiple tools to accomplish this one thing. So just really showing them from end to end, this is the workflow today, or this is the task, or this is the thing that I usually do. But now with this new tool, here's how the process is improved or here's how much more collaborative we are and here's how much easier it is. Whatever those benefits are. So I think really showing them, if you're using Communities in Teams, my goal with rolling this out to a volunteer organization that I'm a part of with my with my kids is getting everybody within our class together first and starting small and building from there. So not trying to roll something out to an entire organization or a group of 100 people at one time because it can just get confusing for people. It's overwhelming. But if you can get a small group of people, if I can get these 15 or 20 people onto it and show them the benefit, we start using it organically together with our small group, then it will grow and the entire organization can start to adopt it. So again, I think that's agnostic for any technology. Just starting small, doing a pilot, so to speak, and showing them again. It may be a little bit more hands on. I know I have a vested interest and I'm a little bit of an anomaly because I work for the product group and I'm going to be rolling this out with a volunteer organization that I'm a part of. But I think anytime you're sharing something with somebody that's new, change is hard. So having a little time to give the give them some hands-on, or just being a little bit more hands-on with instruction and how-to. And the other thing is knowing that all those other tools or things that you use today, you don't have to cut off the cord. It’s not cold turkey. You don't have to leave that all alone. It's like when we were first rolling out teams and people were always on e-mail, and it was kind of a shift of people working out loud and being in this new environment. And we didn't say don't use e-mail. No, just use e-mail, but point them to the Team where you know the collaboration is. And it can be the same way with this new Communities in Teams, right? I used to text everybody, but now I'm going to text them and let them know, hey, dump the pictures in our community. Just slowly start to get people used to going there.

Christian

Well, Laurie, I know that we've covered a lot of ground here. Really appreciate your time and hope to see you at the next tweetjam.

Laurie

I can't wait. Thank you so much for having me. It was really fun.