My First Six Months as a Microsoft Program Manager
This month marks my 6th at Microsoft as a Program Manager, and I wanted to take time to reflect on what I’ve learned from my work and those around me.
As a PM, my manager will assign me a feature, consisting of new functionality or an update to a current part of our product, that I am then responsible for scoping and carrying through the cycles of development with designers and engineers. This can be overwhelming and at first I wasn’t quite sure where to begin. My manager gave me great advice when starting out, and that was to connect with anyone I could who had “worked on a similar or parallel portion of the product”. This was invaluable for me as I was able to learn from others and build upon their knowledge to determine what would be necessary to implement and what was not. Additionally, in parallel, I was making connections with and learning about my team and co-workers. Connecting with and reaching out to my teammates and partner teams would turn out to be an integral part of how I would come to be able to do my best work.
I saw firsthand the power of having a deeper connection with teammates when making crucial decisions as to how a portion of the product was to be designed for our users. Having a standing connection with a person makes it much easier to have those crucial conversations to guide the product in the right direction without getting lost in the haze of which person is right. It made it easier for others to be open to feedback that went against their initial opinions. Ultimately, we were able to make the best decision for our users and the product. As PMs, we’re able to connect the dots and see the bigger picture of how our decisions affect the organization and product through learning and connecting with others across the company.
Speaking of the big picture, I’ve learned that it’s also very important to know what the Leadership Team (LT) is prioritizing and what is important to our customers. When I first began, it was much easier to remain siloed and focus only on the feature I was working on. I attended a group session focused on growth and that’s where the speaker discussed the importance of understanding the business impact of what we were working on. In that moment I realized I had neither considered such a concept nor even bothered to ask myself such a question. I had done a great job of understanding what I was working on, but I had failed to completely grasp why I was working on it. This prompted me to have conversations with my manager, and mentor about what objectives and key results (OKRs) were most important within our org. As an entry level PM, I’m not always working on projects that drive the greatest business impact, but I still found it more valuable to understand what projects were and how my work fit in. I was then able to orient myself and my overall goals better. As I’m now just starting to take on projects with larger scope and longer timeline, these conversations have helped me orient my focus on what is the “North Star” that we’re trying to develop for our customers.
I’d like to end on something new that I’m working on–– the concept of blocking time on my calendar for uninterrupted work. When I began working I’d often find myself being pulled in one direction or another. Work from home has made it even more difficult to disconnect. Now with constant availability on Teams and email becoming the norm in our workplace and my worry of not being always readily available, it’s incredibly challenging to pull away from nonstop notifications. I reached a point where between my position as a PM and role of Accessibility Driver for our product, I was receiving back to back emails and messages. Although a large part of why I love my role is working with people, I realized I wasn’t able to fully commit my focus to the accessibility of our product and my engineers, designers, and features as I should. My manager taught me the concept of reserving time on my calendar for focusing. I’ve now begun to block uninterrupted time on my calendar, cutely drafted as “Focus 🌈” (same as my manager). During this period, I’m able to think deeply about complex problems/features that require new, well-planned solutions.
Looking back on my short time at Microsoft, I find that many of the obstacles or questions I’ve run into have, upon deeper reflection, been resolved by circling back to one of the learnings above. It’s amazing the clarity I was able to find by connecting with people around me on a deeper level, grasping the importance of my work, and/or taking the time to genuinely think through engineering problems. As it happens, one of our key roles as PMs is to drive clarity for others, and that can only happen if we are clear ourselves.
