If you’re an Xbox Insider on the Beta ring and have the latest 2102 update, you’ll see one of the latest features and services I worked on at Xbox - account linking!

I think it’s worth a story time, so let’s do it

If you go to my profile, you will see some icons for external social networks. This feature has been available on Game Bar and the Xbox PC app for over a year now, but I really wanted to bring it to console so people can link their accounts and enable cross-social connections

If you haven’t done it yet, you can connect a multitude of accounts on Settings > Accounts > Linked Social Accounts. You can choose to display any of your linked accounts on your profile (except FB), but some of them have expanded functionalities:

Facebook and Steam: support friend finding, so any friends from these networks who have also linked their accounts to Xbox, will show as friend recommendations to you on Xbox so you can easily add them.
Discord: supports presence sharing, so you can share what you are...

...playing to your friends and servers on Discord ( https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2018/04/24/microsoft-discord-team-connect-gamers-across-xbox-live-discord/)
Reddit: you will earn an Xbox badge on your Reddit profile ( https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2019/12/17/reddit-on-xbox-live/

Now if you were/are @XboxMVP, you might remember that this was a feature that was shared as something we wanted to do about 3 years ago! First of all: THANK YOU for being amazing, giving feedback, being trustworthy. You are so so valued by every single member of team Xbox

But... arguably one of the hardest things about producing/product management is prioritizing work. There’s always a lot to do: new bugs with every new release, a backlog of endless awesome cool features, collaborating and helping other teams with higher pri work, infra work, etc

And for account linking there’s a bit of additional complexity around reaching out to these networks, build a good partnership, ensure the work is mutually beneficial, building new services, all APIs are different... It was sometimes hard to justify all the required work and time

for the perceived benefit. For all the partners in all these companies I worked with: you were awesome

So account linking totally became my ‘pet feature’ (more on that later) that I would bring up when we were doing sprint planning, but it inevitably fell down the cut line

Discord account linking was a super cool project and one of the first things I drove when I first joined Xbox (I remember taking emergent calls during my trip to Japan ), it was super successful, and Steam linking came with Gears 5 to help Steam players more easily find friends

(shout out to @jbeaumont and @McDanRandom for the support at the time). Then my team switched focus to PC, we were able to prioritize more accounts and shipping a more robust set of functionalities on Game Bar and the PC app. BUT I always wanted to make it available on console

Last year there was a lot of higher pri stuff to do for the new gen launches, but me & the team agreed that we would do account linking post launch... I rewrote the spec and designs, so it was all ready to ship. And when I left, development was already underway (thank you team!!)

So now my pet feature is out in the world and I had a little moment last night. It’s small, doesn’t mean a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it means a lot to me and fulfilling a promise I made all those years ago to our MVPs. There’s a lot of potential and synergy that

I hope to see in the future! A brief note about so called ‘pet features’: they’re worth it. Employees are knowledgeable and also fans and they have an instinct for small things that are never important enough to prioritize, but mean a ton for a subset of users and themselves...

Take a bet on them sometimes! The team/employee gets to feel ownership over a direct contribution they made to a product, and quality of life updates do matter for the overall experience your users will have.

Anyways - enjoy! And to my old team: congrats we did it