Microsoft Kaizala

Corporate Vice President Rajiv Kumar was inspired by Satya Nadella to ‘hit refresh’, to re-evaluate what productivity meant to mobile phone users who are on-the-go and rely on their phones to do much of their work. He went on a year-long journey talking with customers from all over the world about what they expected from a mobile-phone experience to be productive.

These learnings included insights such as people plugging-in consumer technologies into organizational workflows, and chat applications playing a much larger role in day-to-day work. Along with these learnings, the Office team in India found out through numerous focus groups and personal interviews that many businesses and individuals were not only mobile-first, but mobile-only, and needed better mobile apps for their phones to do three key things – create content on the fly, manage contacts in a phone-based customer relationship management system, and have a shared, secure mobile environment for teams to collaborate.

The Kaizala team focused on fulfilling these needs while providing structure to unstructured communication along with private channels and more secure ways to discuss and protect sensitive organizational data. These opportunities and more would be realized and implemented in what is now known as Microsoft Kaizala, an app for group communications and work management on IOS and Android.

“Effective collaboration is key to running a successful business. We observed that conversations form the backbone of a business setting and often lead to actionable tasks,” Prashant Gupta, a program manager within Office on the early stages of the app. “Currently in the unorganized small businesses space, there are hardly any tools that allow users to add structure and improve the overall efficiency of their business.”

The original Kaizala project team started with the vision to “Empower every organization and community to achieve more through secure and purposeful chat.” The Microsoft Garage was the perfect platform to help the early versions of Kaizala reach their initial set of customers, to experiment, get feedback, and quickly iterate.

Kaizala was launched as a Garage project on 22 Feb 2016. By April, it was being used by Andhra Pradesh government officials for group communication during large scale events.

Kaizala was used to effectively manage and coordinate a festival attended by 20 million people. Many government and state departments in India took notice and began using Kaizala, as did other well-known organizations in the country.

On 22 Feb 2017, exactly one year after releasing through the Garage, Satya Nadella announced the product in preview in Future Decoded event in India.

The project has embraced hack culture throughout its entire journey. At the 2016 Hackathon, the team took the opportunity to double down on a variety of ideas. Three features developed at 2016 Hackathon shipped in Kaizala: Kaizala Arena, Comments and Likes, and Awesome Photo Sharing. The team has carried on this tradition of using hackathons to rapidly prototype features and ideas, and in 2017, Kaizala sparked what could be characterized as a local movement – 26 projects for Kaizala were hacked on with over 50 people participating.

Kaizala provides an easier and more productive way for these organizations to collaborate with their employees, supporters, customers, and partners. Kaizala is also easily extensible and continues to be integrated into many organizations’ existing workflows, bringing effective, structured communication and work management to a mobile world.