What It's Like As a Microsoft Product Manager
Felix is a Microsoft product manager in the Azure cloud computing services organization. This is his firsthand experience with the job, including everything you might want to know about what it’s like to work at Microsoft, as he told it.
What does an average day look like for a Microsoft product manager?
Every day is different, but I generally spend my time doing one of three things:
- Clarifying what to build
- Guiding execution
- Reporting progress
Being a product manager is very collaborative, so I’m constantly partnering with my colleagues in engineering, design and product.
On an average day, I’ll have at least three meetings.
1. Roadmap meeting with an engineering manager
I meet with my engineering manager for an hour as my first meeting of the day. We discussed the roadmap and realized we may need to cut a couple of features because some work took longer than we planned. We review our backlog and discuss potential features to cut. I agree to get customer feedback to revise our prioritized list of work if necessary.
2. Customer feedback review
Before my next meeting, I review customer feedback and notice a bug in one of my features. I email the customer to provide a workaround and add a task to our team’s backlog.
I reply to a few emails before my next meeting: a 15-minute stand-up with the engineering team.
3. Stand-up meeting with engineers
In the stand-up, we discuss the current status of work in progress. One engineer has a question about a feature, and I realize the requirements could use more detail. I set up a working session later in the day to clarify what needs to be done.
In the hour before my next meeting, I continue working on a new feature. I provide feedback to the designer on the mock-ups they created. The options look great! I leave some comments and set up a meeting with the designer to review the final decision. I also schedule a meeting for the following week to get feedback from engineers and other product managers on the team.
To wrap up my day, I reviewed a PowerBI dashboard that displays usage data for a feature released three weeks ago. Forty percent of users adopted the feature, and 95% of user surveys are at least four out of five stars. This is excellent news! Our target is 50% adoption within three months and 90% ratings of at least four stars. I write a status update, include screenshots of the report, and send it to my manager and our engineering team.
After I finish the meeting to clarify the work discussed during stand-up, I write some SQL queries to gather data to support another feature I’ve been working on. I end the day, noting my thoughts on how the data highlights the problem we are trying to solve.
What is an out-of-the-ordinary day like as a Microsoft product manager?
An atypical day is when I have no meetings. I may spend the day refining my specs, scheduling chats with customers and planning our roadmap. On days like this, I like to do big-picture thinking and develop the vision for my feature area based on new market research or customer feedback. My vision document includes details of some of the most significant opportunities for my team as I see them.
Sometimes I’ll block my calendar for an entire week with back-to-back interviews or focus groups with customers. I develop a combination of questions, design mocks, prototypes, and surveys, then partner with the user research, design, engineering and product teams to start a research study. I use the study results to discover my customers’ most considerable challenges and add new ideas to my product roadmap and vision document.
What’s your favorite part about being a Microsoft product manager?
I love working with people and building consensus. It feels good when I talk to customers, and we reach an understanding of how my product can serve them better. I enjoy taking that feedback along with product data to inform what my team should build. Seeing the nods of agreement as we develop a collective vision of success is energizing. It’s also great to see customers express gratitude about my feature and how it helped them.
What do you dislike about your job as a Microsoft product manager?
Project management is one of my least favorite things. This often involves tracking bugs and features in backlog management software and writing status reports for my team and partners.
While I don’t love this part of the job, I appreciate how it helps keep the team on target and aware of our progress. Without this work, it would be challenging to manage my work.
This article was written by Shikhar Sachdev for HackerNoon and was lightly edited and published with permission.