Microsoft Teams might be launching across the world today, but the app started off on a fruit farm in Hawaii and a hotel room in Las Vegas. These unconventional work locations formed the foundations for the Microsoft Teams chat app that thousands of businesses will start using this week. “We really wanted to experience being close together and get the team much more close-knit so that we could model how we really make Teams more close-knit in software,” explains Brian MacDonald, head of Microsoft Teams, in an interview with The Verge.

Brian MacDonald worked on the original version of Microsoft’s Outlook email app, and was tasked with creating a concept for the company’s new chat software. Microsoft had tried, years ago, to convince businesses to switch to group chats, but the product it acquired for the task wasn’t good enough. Around the time Slack and Hipchat were growing and starting to get popular, MacDonald wrote a document to pitch what would become Microsoft Teams, and put together a group to make it a reality. That original pitch, back in February 2015, included the bizarre offsite locations for brainstorming what Microsoft Teams would become.

“We brought together a set of people who had really worked great together many times before,” says MacDonald. The engineering team, led by Jigar Thakkar, headed to Las Vegas, and MacDonald invited other members to his house on a fruit farm in Hawaii. The two groups would conference call to share ideas, mimicking typical office environments that are now spread remotely and worldwide. “We brought these big chart papers with us... and covered the outside of Brian’s house,” explains Mira Lane, a UX designer on Microsoft Teams. “We really used the environment and were sat down brainstorming every day.” The team in Hawaii even plucked eggs together at the farm, went on hikes, and participated in ad-hoc yoga sessions. These offsites were clearly great team-bonding sessions, but the remote nature of them helped the teams really switch off and understand what features are needed in modern chat apps.

A month after a fruit farm, Microsoft Teams was born

By April 2015, a month after returning from the offsite sessions, the group behind Microsoft Teams had already created a working prototype of the software. It was basic and lacked notifications support, but the team started using it on a daily basis to feel the pain and understand what needed to be fixed and changed. “Every Friday we used to have these 60-second demos,” explains Jigar Thakkar, head of engineering for Microsoft Teams. “Every developer on the team would come and demo what they had built in that week to all the developers, program managers, and designers. Week after week we’d see the whole product coming together very quickly.”

Changes and tweaks included a greater focus on the idea of fun, and the need to integrate closely with other Microsoft Office apps. “We wanted to say that companies and groups that adopted and made good use of Teams, would enjoy working together more,” says MacDonald. “We thought this was super important. In the past people worked to live; now they want to live at work.”

This type of work-fun is a central part of Microsoft Teams, and it’s reflected through the stickers, Giphy integration, and other quirky parts of the software. “It raised some eyebrows with a set of folks, the amount of time that we invested in the first version to have things like a fancy Giphy picker, editable memes, and a set of retro Office stickers,” explains MacDonald.

These fun parts of chat software are why so many people have flocked toward services like Facebook Messenger, Slack, WeChat, and many more. Emoji and GIFs allow you to express an opinion in a workplace, as harsh as it may be, without the need for a passive-aggressive back-and-forth email chain. "I’ve never been on a team that’s this close knit, that gives each other such crap and things,” jokes MacDonald, referencing the ability to express an opinion with a joke that doesn’t create an awkward office situation.

It’s easy to compare this part of Microsoft Teams to Slack, its major competitor. Slack has a similar quirky element to its software, with its built-in Giphy tool or the ability to create custom emoji. Slack’s notes for its app updates are often works of art, alongside its entertaining Twitter account that’s full of anecdotes and frequently interacts with customers. It’s clear Microsoft has been watching and learning from others.

Microsoft spent time looking at competitor products

“While we were building the product, we’d spend a week using nothing but a competitor product,” reveals MacDonald, although none of them were quite what Microsoft wanted for its chat app. Microsoft is really betting on the fact the company is tying Teams to its Office 365 service and its deep Office integration to help it compete against Slack, Facebook Workplace, and others. Given the scale of Office, it’s probably a good bet, and Slack is clearly concerned.

Bryan Goode, Microsoft’s senior director of Office 365, isn’t phased by Slack’s nervousness, or a lack of a free Microsoft Teams tier. “I have a great deal of respect for them [Slack] as a competitor,” explains Goode, in a separate interview with The Verge. “They’ve broken some ground, they’ve done something new. They got some traction in this market, so I have a lot of respect for them. On the other hand, I feel really good about our value proposition to our customer, and what we have to offer.”

Microsoft doesn't seem worried about missing out on businesses that might opt for Google Apps and Slack, instead of Office 365 and Microsoft Teams. “We feel really good about our growth across segments with Office 365, it’s not something that worries us at this point,” says Goode. “I think it’s exciting to add another tool to the portfolio.”

So what’s next for Microsoft Teams? Microsoft is planning to add features like external guest access, so you can invite friends that don’t work at your organization into channels. Richer Outlook integration is also coming soon, with the ability to drag and drop messages or calendar items straight into Microsoft Teams channels. Even the mobile apps will be updated, with built-in audio and video calling and bots in each channel.

Microsoft is also planning to support 150 third-party integrations at launch today, with notables like SAP and Trello coming soon. It’s clear that Microsoft Teams, like Windows itself, will be updated regularly with new tweaks and changes. There are around 100 new features since the initial preview last year, and Microsoft is focused on interoperability and running Teams as a service. Expect to see a lot more Office integration over the course of 2017, too, as that’s Microsoft’s key selling point.

Microsoft says Teams won't kill email

Don’t expect to see Microsoft claiming Microsoft Teams will kill email, though. “I think in this world today, we’re not talking about substitute behavior, we’re not talking about Teams replacing email or Slack replacing email for that matter, as much as competitors would like people to believe that happens,” says Goode. “I actually think what’s happened is we’ve got this proliferation of tools in our toolkit, and now we can do collaboration in the tools that make sense. I think email has a very viable future.”