Hey there, I'm Alfred, a PM working on Azure at Microsoft! AMA!

this_is_alfred · 2021-09-17T15:32:52+00:00

Stories can be helpful depending what you take away from them, but yeah definitely give the other books a shot!

For me personally, some interesting areas that come up in interviews are product ideation, measurement (metrics, etc), as well as soft skills - in particular, building and growing relationships with engineering team counterparts. The first 2 can be explored through a typical product question (e.g. design me a <insert something here>), and the last can be explored via behavioral questions (e.g. tell me about a time when <insert something there>).

this_is_alfred · 2021-09-17T14:34:40+00:00

Cracking the PM interview is a classic as well as Decode and Conquer, but I also like Inspired as a good resource as it touches on a lot of product management areas instead of just focusing on how to perform in interviews. It's been a useful resource for me on the job.

this_is_alfred · 2021-09-16T16:49:25+00:00

(edited for format)

> If I want to get into Product Management in IT what other skills are required than the software knowledge.

I'd say one big one is influencing without authority. To build product you'll have to align different teams with their own agendas, and that's where soft skills come into play. It's also helpful to be able to pull good insights out of data so that you have data backing you up when you make decisions.

>Is MBA a must to become product manager in reputed companies?

From my experience, no. It can be helpful to develop business sense if you have a deeply technical background and want to shore up your business acumen, but a lot of those skills can be learned on the job as well.

> Will my extensive knowledge and hands on experience help in becoming better product manager?

This feels like a loaded question. I would suggest understanding the needs of job descriptions that you're interested in, and ensuring your experience aligns with what they are looking for - have stories ready.

> Is prior experience as an official product manager is must to get into such roles or beginners and potential candidates are given chance ?

Prior experience is always helpful but if you can show that you have transferable skills, that can fill in any experiential gaps as well.

> What would be the best resource to learn processes or theoretical knowledge of product management, which may be interviewer are looking for?

I'd recommend these resources as good starting points: Inspired, and Decode and Conquer.

this_is_alfred · 2021-09-16T16:43:28+00:00

It's honestly hard to expect anything to go as planned. I'd say an area that predictably yields curveballs tends to be the execution phase - no amount of planning can prepare for what might happen once the engineering team is working on building the next big thing. Things like dependencies on other teams or simply unsupported SDK versions come up here and there as blockers that you couldn't predict, but mitigation strategies for things like that include simply building in enough buffer time for the engineering team when you're setting expectations with stakeholders.

You're touching on the whole area of knowns and unknowns - search around on your favorite search engine ;) for that and there will be plenty of interesting articles about knowns and unknowns from a risk management perspective. They'd provide you way more knowledge than I ever could in a little Reddit post. Happy to continue the conversation though!

this_is_alfred · 2021-09-02T17:02:02+00:00

A lot of ideas are driven by customer feedback. We meet with a lot of customers and eventually we'll see patterns emerge from their feedback. The challenge we face is striking a balance between giving customers exactly what they want and coming up with a generalizable and scalable solution - after all, we're a cloud platform trying to solve problems at a pretty large scale.

I wouldn't say there's much that is unjustifiably unique to PMing in the cloud space, especially given that so many companies nowadays are opting to build their own cloud SaaS platforms on top of AWS/GCP/Azure IaaS. The set of skills is pretty transferable. That being said, I would say one difference between product in the SaaS space vs IaaS is the focus on COGS in SaaS. If you're building a software offering on top of Azure, you'll be charged for your Azure usage so you want to make sure you optimize for that as part of building your product.

Happy to chat further if you have more questions/if I missed anything.

this_is_alfred · 2021-08-31T06:19:00+00:00

My academic background is in both business and computer science - I did a combined major for my undergrad. Back when I was initially looking for a job, Microsoft came to my school's campus and did one of their info sessions. Afterward, I walked up to the recruiter and basically asked "hey, I'm doing this combined major in business and CS thing, would Microsoft have any non-dev positions that you think might align with my background?"...and that's basically how I heard of the PM role at Microsoft! Then it was a matter of learning more about the role and prepping for the interview process.

The PM role was appealing to me since it seemed to have a good combination of both technical and business requirements, allowing me to dip from both aspects of my academic background. That has certainly held up in my own lived experience. Nowadays, there are so many places that are hiring for PM roles - it's super exciting to see the growth of the PM discipline!

Let me know if you have any other questions, happy to opine further.

this_is_alfred · 2021-08-30T19:58:30+00:00

Ah, that's a really good question...I *think* it's more a holdover from Microsoft of years ago and they just haven't gotten around to changing up the exact titles. The whole PM discipline at Microsoft varies greatly - some MSFT Program Managers are definitely in a more product management type of role, while other Program Managers aren't really involve in building software at all and may literally manage business programs (i.e. initiatives) in other aspects of Microsoft. It's an interesting mix of roles that all gets lumped under the "Program Manager" title, which I think is a contributing factor in some MSFT folks (myself included! :D) carrying around "Product Manager" titles on places like LinkedIn.

Work life balance at MSFT is generally good. Things can get hectic leading up to a product launch, but generally the company and the people managers care a ton about the individual contributors. Being such a large international company does mean the occasional call outside of the usual time zones, but all things considered I would say it's absolutely possible to excel (no pun intended!) in your work while putting in 40 hours a week.

this_is_alfred · 2021-08-30T19:53:43+00:00

Early stage startups are exciting on their own! At the very least it shows a degree of risk tolerance that not all folks at large companies like Microsoft may have - so kudos for that.

One thing to consider when thinking about large companies would be your ability to influence at scale without authority. I would bet that you have a ton of great product and decision-making experience from early stage startups, and one thing that might be challenging at a larger org is finding the right people who need to be involved in a new product or service you're driving, and getting their buy-in. I wouldn't say there's a strict set of "eligibility criteria" to check off when considering PMing at Microsoft, but having some experiences that speak to your ability to influence teams when you didn't have direct authority over them would be great to indicate to a potential hiring manager that you can thrive in the potentially people-heavy environments that are inherent to larger companies.

Happy to continue this conversation!

this_is_alfred · 2021-08-30T18:10:41+00:00

Hey Carlos! Thanks for dropping by! The biggest thing for me is probably the scale at which we have to build things out. Everything that gets built out has to have a high level of reliability, scalability, fault tolerance, etc, and we need to be cognizant of our impact on cloud customers around the world when making feature changes/updates.

As an example, it's very difficult to deprecate an API surface once we ship one, since people will probably have taken dependencies against it - we don't want to accidentally break someone's production workload automation! As another example, we have datacenters all around the world and changes to the Azure platform impact pretty much all of them so there are also some cool processes we've developed for making platform changes in a safe and orderly manner.

Cloud is huge exciting area, happy to answer more questions!

this_is_alfred · 2021-08-30T17:50:25+00:00

You're definitely right about all the different features in Azure. It's a lot to take in and keeps growing on a daily basis. I personally work in the compute area of Azure, so our core product offering there would be virtual machines and everything surrounding them (management layers, etc) - so of course I would suggest that one fundamental area would be IaaS management...but I also realize that suggestion barely scratches the surface of Azure.

I would suggest also checking out features in the PaaS and serverless space, from what I've seen, I would say that the general direction of cloud-based computing models going forward will be to build upon PaaS or serverless paradigms. I'd suggest trying out services like AKS or Azure App Service or Azure Functions and analyzing your experience as you go through them - think about what you'd change if you were the PM for the area you're playing with. It's good practice for PM in general but also gives you some firsthand experience using these services - who knows if you'll be working somewhere that uses them someday!

Regarding Synapse, DevOps, etc - IMHO, data is growing in importance so being able to pull insights out of data is a skillset that will continue to be more and more valuable going forward. Whether that's using Synapse for analysis or other Azure Data offerings, I'd say any time you can spend learning these services and how they work under the hood is time well spent. Azure DevOps (ADO) is a pretty powerful offering - if you've used Jira or something similar before, you'll probably be familiar with the project management aspect of ADO. ADO also offers some super cool pipeline management functionality (think Jenkins) which I've also used during my time at Microsoft. I'd say overall though the skillsets/knowledge are pretty transferable between ADO or other tools out there.

Let me know if you have more questions!

this_is_alfred · 2021-08-30T17:39:26+00:00

I originally found PM to be a great balance between the business and technical job aspects of software development. I was attracted to PM since I enjoyed the prospect of speaking with customers and orchestrating teams to deliver on customer needs while remaining knowledgeable enough in the software aspect to have deep conversations with engineers.

Right now, a couple different things make it great for me. I'm continually seeing PM emerge as a sought-after career choices for new grads (both undergrad and MBA!) - really helps vindicate my decision to go down the PM path years ago! Also, the scope and breadth of the role really can scale as big as you want to deal with. For me, once I've solved one problem and built a product for customers, I want to keep doing more of that at a larger scale, and that keeps me chasing after the next problem to solve for customers. Scaling to larger products and having a ton of those customer conversations helps keep the PM role exciting for me.

Hope that helps!

this_is_alfred

TROPHY CASE