Microsoft Program Management for Dummies An insider's guide to Program Management at Microsoft: the myth and the reality By: Michael Surkan

Who’s Michael? Technical director at PC Week Labs and IT manager in past life Worked for 9 years at Microsoft in both Product and Program Management roles Program Manager in Windows networking group – Windows Firewall, Windows Filtering Platform, IPv6, Teredo, VPNs, Peer-to-Peer networking Constantly pushing boundaries – Started Recession Study Group in 2005 – Conducting personal research project into Linux in 2004, with 25,000 Linux survey responses – Fierce advocate for customers

The amorphous PM Job title loosely describes a variety of functions at Microsoft – Virtual development team leader – Partnering activities – Project scheduling – Evangelism Oscillations between generalists and specialists

Classical Program Management: the generalist Classic PM role is a generalist: – Understanding the market, customer, and business requirements. – Creating functional specifications. – Managing schedules (and keeping them on track) – Coordinating the development and test teams – Reporting status across all team members, and upper management – Ensuring that marketing, documentation writers, and helpdesk teams are ready to support (and sell) the product when it ships Has to get the “big picture”, responsible for success or failure of products as a hole Leverage resources across company to get work done

Strong yet Powerless PMs have all the responsibility but no authority Must be terrific salesperson to convince team- mates, and other groups, to sign on to work You are the missionary spreading the word

Turning Japanese: Leading through consensus Microsoft is a matrix organization, with little central authority All parties need to reach a mutual consensus PM is the master of driving (and maintaining) this consensus It is tantamount to a failure of leadership if a PM brings proposals to a VP that have not already gotten the badge of approval by all the teams, and individuals, who need to be involved. Opinions of some individuals carry more weight than others. No easy methods to navigate the eddies of political influence – Getting these key influencers to back your ideas, or projects, is the critical to getting your projects off to an auspicious start

The great communicator Key attribute of any PM is the constant stream of status updates and meetings they produce. – Necessary to keep all the loosely connected members of the virtual project teams coordinated, and keep senior managers from getting anxious. – s with the notes, and work items, from every meeting should be sent the same day of the meeting. A central repository all notes, and documents, related to the project should be maintained. Weekly meetings with all the key project members are the mainstay of PM life – Include everyone who needs to be involved (e.g. marketing, documentation, engineers, product support)

Conformists only please PMs expected to execute the vision, and ideas, espoused by managers. Diverging from group consensus is a liability. – The bigger the idea, the more likely it will require getting the consent of even more teams, and people, to make it a reality, which makes it harder to get off the ground.

PMs do it better Microsoft strongly believes it’s PM culture is core to success PM role highly coveted as springboard to career advancement – Self-fulfilling since many of the best employees want to be PMs Somehow mistakes still happen – Microsoft is dominated by engineering, other firms by marketing For good or ill, PMs are core part of Microsoft culture and business processes

The PM interview Use examples from your experiences – Don’t have to be directly associated with work or tech Give examples of how you: – Handled tough decisions – Drove agreement across a lot of people – Defined a process for doing work It’s the process – They don’t care about hearing the “right” answer for how to design or build something. They want to hear that you have a good process for coming up with the answers. Show that you understand both engineering and business – A passion for meeting customer/market needs Specialized knowledge in product area is more critical than ever

Appendix Michael’s blog article on Microsoft Program Management Michael’s blog article on Microsoft Program Management Steven Sinofsky’s view of Microsoft Program Management Steven Sinofsky’s view of Microsoft Program Management Zen of PM article on Microsoft Program Management Zen of PM article on Microsoft Program Management Becoming a Microsoft Program Manager Michael’s “anatomy of a job search” podcasts Michael’s blog