It was the moment of decision.  The future of our whole team was being decided.  There was a hush in the room.

I looked across the table at the three developers and there was a sense of uneasiness.  I could sense that they were calculating all the work that needed to be done.  I looked at my lead next to me and I could see that she was half-excited and half-scared.  I then looked at our Product Unit Manager, Kevin, and I could tell he was thinking it had to be one way or the other – there could be no compromises.  Once we made the decision we could never go back and change it.  The cost of doing so would prohibit it. 

I, myself, felt a lump in my throat.  One side of me thought what a great opportunity to build from the ground up.  The other side of me worried about how long it would take and whether it would be practical.  The other other side of me was thinking this meeting will be long and i should have remembered to eat lunch before hand.

It was May 17th, 2004.  The landscape in the mail services marketplace was changing.  Competition was heating up.  Customers were getting fed up with email because of spam.  Phishing attacks were becoming a bigger problem than spam.  It was time to make a major decision.

Do we iterate on the existing Hotmail service or do we start from scratch?

Three developers, four program managers and the PUM got in a small conference room for a secret meeting.   The meeting was called “Hotmail UX Strategy” so no one looking at the Microsoft calendar system would know exactly what it was for.  Walter, Richard and Johnny were the developers.  Jen, Reeves, Mike and I were the program managers.  Kevin was the PUM.

There was a lot of discussion of pros and cons.  Walter, one of the developers, mentioned that he had done a prototype a few years ago that did client side rendering but at that time not enough browsers supported it so we had decided against doing it.  Jen, my lead PM, asked him if he still had it.  Walter decided to look through folders on his computer as we continued talking.  “I found it!”, he mentioned in the middle of the conversation a few minutes later.

Everyone huddled around his computer to see it.  The prototype was very fast.  It only did a few things and it was based on the design of two years ago but it nevertheless worked. “How soon can we get this ready?” asked Kevin.

“Wait wait.  It is not that easy.  It will be a lot of work” noted another developer, Richard.   “How much work?” I asked.  “We don’t even know” said Johnny, another developer.  As we sat thinking about it it was clear that it would be the biggest change in the history of Hotmail.

It was the moment of decision.  We looked at each other.  “We have to do this.  We have no choice”, someone said (I don’t remember who).  We debated about it but soon a consensus emerged.  

We were going to make the biggest change in the history of Hotmail.

(Read second part of this story here)

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