How Microsoft 365 grows

When a free trial exists, the CTA button must say so ('Try Free for One Month'), not 'Buy Now' under a free-trial headline; users fear one-tap charges and hesitate to press buy buttons.

Replace bullet text with cards containing GIFs or illustrations of key benefits: premium desktop apps, 1 TB OneDrive storage, AI features. Example: an illustration of six family members each getting 1 TB of OneDrive.

Separate A/B test: displayed the annual plan's monthly-equivalent price (e.g. about $8/month for $99/year) even though billing is annual.

Reordered the paywall so Microsoft 365 Family ($9.99) is the default/top option instead of Personal ($6.99). The pricier option acts as an anchor, like seeing expensive items in a luxury store and buying a tie.

Microsoft 365 consumer plans (personal, family, Copilot Pro) are sold via App Store/Play in-app purchase alongside ~10 other consumer channels and a large direct web business. Users already have a card attached and trust Apple/Google/Amazon to manage subscriptions, and many use the phone as their primary device. The team treated the store fee as the normal cost of any acquisition channel and invested in the mobile apps.

One Microsoft 365 app and subscription covers Word, Excel, PowerPoint, notes, PDF, signing and a scanner ($9.99 family, $6.99 personal in the US). Many productivity jobs are one-off per month (one scan, a couple of documents), but combined across the suite users keep finding a use each month, which holds retention. Priced up to 50-60% below buying the same scenarios individually.

Product framework from a Microsoft VP: keep neutralizing competitor moves, keep differentiating, keep incubating, and maintain. After each WWDC the team asks how new features apply and ships day one (Dark Mode, Vision Pro). Competitor features are judged against the app's jobs to be done (e.g. Word: resume, note, book) rather than copied. Mix shifts with maturity: early on mostly neutralization and differentiation, now ~30% incubation (AI features).

In 2015-2018 the team added an MMP and an engagement platform while the mobile apps were still finding product-market fit. Implementations could not cope with fast-changing privacy law (GDPR) and a single app serving both enterprise and consumer users, and the vendors were young. Only after the mobile apps reached product-market fit did they integrate an MMP again (early 2024).

Brand is covered by app titles (Microsoft Word, Excel). A smaller part of keyword work targets competitors, including small productivity apps that top the charts. The bigger part uses user research on what the apps are used for to target generic job keywords: resume creation, note taking, slide decks, budgeting and invoices for Excel (someone searching 'invoice' may just need a simple Excel template, not QuickBooks). Works with an ASO vendor; description must still read cleanly, not as stuffed keywords.

Update keywords every month. Once a keyword has ranked top 3 consistently for about a year, slowly remove it from the 100-character keyword field to free space for new terms such as AI or Copilot for new features; bring a keyword back if it proves sticky.

Run multiple Apple Search Ads campaigns; use the MMP to check whether a keyword drives only monthly active usage or real subscriptions, under strict cost-per-install limits. Move high-performing ASA keywords into organic ASO metadata or bid more on them.

Set CPI limits per platform from LTV:CAC; Android CPI limits are up to 50x lower than iOS because few Android installs convert to paid. Also watch tools billed by data points or MAU, since cheap Android usage can raise costs without revenue. LTVs are in the hundreds of dollars, so budgets are managed like any consumer SaaS.

ASO covers branded keywords (brand value) and unbranded keywords. User research and Gen Z trends feed keyword optimization. A jobs-to-be-done list defines ~10 things each app should rank for (e.g. resume, budget, invoice), weighted toward jobs people are willing to pay premium for, so acquired users convert. Goal: keep at least the top three spots in most categories, since startups can outrank Word on any keyword.

The VP requires an estimated-impact figure for every idea, vendor or optimization. A large idea list from many sources is triaged; at double/triple-digit million MAU, work must affect tens of millions of users, not 1 million, because team size does not grow with MAU. The biggest wins are often simple: purchase flow, first-run experience, performance, reliability, file-open speed, app size, and 100% transaction completion (5-6% of transactions were failing at one point, fixed first).

AI features are picked by mapping generative AI capabilities (summarization, outline-to-document, retrieval-augmented generation, translation) onto the apps' jobs to be done: outline to document in Word, slide generation in PowerPoint, insights from Excel data, meeting recaps, and status updates pulled from the user's own files via Copilot. Aim: full document creation on mobile without 10 browser tabs.

Uses Apple's promotional offers and promo codes, and is evaluating contingent pricing (new at the time). Aim is to stay current with every App Store monetization feature.