Office Labs

After toiling in obscurity for the past nine months, my new team has finally "gone public." Last summer, I left my gig in Product Planning after nearly six years to head up an Incubation team in Microsoft Office Labs. There are about 60 of us in "Labs," all focused on doing concept tests of interesting ideas focused on productivity.

Concept tests are just what they sound like: they're not quite "full blown" products, but are tools that are fleshed-out well enough for folks to use and experiment with. We hope to learn from each of these and incorporate the best ideas and learnings into our shipping products. We have a pipeline full of these and expect to make them available on officelabs.com on a regular basis.

The site went live today with a few of the team's first projects. One is an Office add-in called Search Commands that allows you to find features you need in Office using more common language and terms. We also shipped a web app called Community Clips, a collection of "how to" videos on Office that anyone can contribute to (the "community" can add its own "clips"...get it? Aren't we clever monkeys...).

So far, there's nothing directly from my team posted on the site. Yet.

My team is focused on building prototypes for mobile workers. We're specifically interested in concept-testing innovations around how the mobile phone can be an even more effective tool for folks who work away from their desk or don't even have a "desk" at all. This is area that is going through some incredibly huge and interesting changes right now as people demand to get their work done anytime, anywhere. We've got some cool things up our sleeves, but more on that later.

For now, check out the Office Labs website and try out some of the stuff we're building. We're very interested in your feedback. And if this sounds like a cool gig (it is), we're also hiring.