About BXT In late 2014, I was introduced to the concept of “BXT” – it formalized the three pillars of product development in my organization at Microsoft: It basically boils down to having three groups of workers in your organization: Product Management, Design, and Engineering.  Each is responsible for upholding 1 of the 3 pillars necessary to create a successful product.  These three teams were already somewhat in place in our organization, but there was an effort to more formalize these roles and their deliverables. At a company like Microsoft where technology has historically trumped user experience design, having a formalized framework that considered them equal considerably improved the overall quality of the software we were building. The Product Management team set out to define our customers’ business needs and wants as problems.  The Design team’s job was to come up with solutions to these problems.  The Engineering team was to find creative and efficient ways of implementing these solutions.  And of course, there’s some overlap between these – a designer can help a product manager better define the problem or provide an engineer with several proposed solutions to find one that’s most cost effective. The lifecycle of a BXT […]