Microsoft Teams, a collaboration software, was seeking ways to encourage adoption and use from SFU students

Presented to: Gaelan Love, Product Marketing Lead and Dipti Arora, Educational Business Solutions Specialist

Problems:

1. Lack of awareness around Teams, especially from SFU students

2. Lack of communication around product benefits directly to student needs, coupled with high competition from other industry-recognized platforms with some of the same features

3. High initial learning curve and barriers to transition from competing platforms like Google Drive and Slack

Impact: Raise awareness, educate, convert and retain users (both student clubs and the general student population) at Simon Fraser University, to encourage the implementation of Teams into their future workplaces

Key Contributions:

•  Establishing credibility as experts who know what students, stakeholders, student leaders and student organizations value; supporting our recommendations by bringing forth personal experiences

•  Strategized a step-by-step, holistic marketing plan from awareness to retention, based on challenges and goals

•  Identified and justified market segment - student clubs, as skills are most transferable to workplaces and since they impact students at scale

•  Identified the right channel to credibly reach clubs in a scalable way

•  Identified key use cases and features that benefit the Student Engagement Office and each student leader so they are encouraged to explore and implement Teams

•  Analyzed needs and pain points of point-of-contacts, influencers and users, to promote aligned benefits and incentives