Brian Groth's Life at Microsoft : Life at Microsoft

I've got a new job: Leaving the MTC, joining Windows Live!

bgroth — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 04:14:00 GMT

I am moving to the MSN / Windows Live team! I have been working with the Microsoft Technology Centers for a few years now, and have been focused on the "enterprise" customer space for my entire 12 years here at Microsoft. So, it's time to move.

I am joining a group within MSN that does product planning and business management for Windows Live Mail, Hotmail, MSN Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, Spaces, OneCare, Safety Center, and a variety of other products. I will be the Regional Business Manager helping each of these products succeed in many of the countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. My wife and I plan to move to Paris so we can be somewhat centrally located, plus just for the adventure of it all (need to learn French).

It should be a fun, educational, entertaining, and adventurous. And what a great time to join this part of the company! There are new and updated products rolling out all the time and they just keep getting better and better, not to mention how Windows Vista will leverage these web services too. I have a ton to learn about that and all of the products I will be focused on.

As I continue to improve my business management skills, I will update my blog. I am now off to learn about all of these products, new strategies, meet new people, take numerous trips around Europe, and eventually move there. Wish me luck!

Traveling the world, missing our dogs

bgroth — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 14:39:00 GMT

Lorie and I are visiting Microsoft Technology Centers and squeezing in some vacation in Beijing, Tokyo, Taipei, Dubai, Frankfurt, Zurich, Milan, Venice, San Francisco/Berkeley, and who knows where else. Even though this 'Round The World trip is amazing (in only 25 days), we miss our dogs. They are pictured here while they stay with Kerry, Kevin, Quanta, and Siri at Mannered Mutts. Ripley is on the left and Milo is on the right. And yes, we know they are adorable!

Click here if the picture doesn't load.

Why I work at Microsoft

bgroth — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 10:03:00 GMT

I recently posted my resume on my blog, and this resulted in a few people to contact me wondering if I wanted to leave Microsoft. My answer is always "NO". Here is what I love about my job, which is my minimum bar before even considering working somewhere else.

I get to work with amazingly smart people all around the world, who in turn work with great customers on interesting solutions. There’s nothing like having smart peers to push my own limits.
I get to be involved with the different approaches to selling software in different locations around the world. The reasons for the differences are fascinating.
I get to come up with strategies, the processes to accomplish them, and then see them through. I see this as ongoing and real-world MBA training.
I get to apply our own products to our own problems, such as data analysis, reporting, remote meetings, and I of course live on e-mail and IM.
I get to travel the world to help, learn, build community, consult, and visit with the different teams around the world. The cultural differences are fascinating.
I get to dig deep into how Microsoft measures business internally (it’s more than just sales). The business aspect is complex (at times) and interesting too.

And of course, Microsoft itself has amazing products, technologies, and people. And being a geek, it’s a blast to get my hands on products long before they hit the market (even if I do have to suffer with pre-release bugs at times).

Finally, as it turns out, I completely believe in our mission to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential. I like working at a place where I believe in the company's overall and guiding mission.

In other words, I love working here.

How can Microsoft help change the world?

bgroth — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 07:38:00 GMT

I've been doing some thinking and figured I would ask the blogsphere.... How would you combine all of these different assets to enable our customers and partners to change the world? It seems like we have a lot of stuff (facilities, patents, technologies, experts, training, and other) that could be combined in some way, but I haven't been able to really pull it all together to come up with a cohesive plan.

Physical Buildings: Microsoft Technology Centers (MTC), Microsoft Innovation Centers, Microsoft Home, Microsoft Center for Information Work,

Patents: Microsoft’s patents and technologies that are available for licensing are available via our Intellectual Property Licensing: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/ip/

Expertise: Architect Evangelists (many are at the Microsoft Technology Centers), Technology Architects (many are at the Microsoft Technology Centers), Consultants in Microsoft Services, Microsoft’s Solution Integration partners, and Microsoft’s Regional Directors.

Education: The materials from the following resources all touch on “explaining and teach our technologies” which is needed before a solution can be created. Microsoft IT Academy, ISV Community Days, MSDN, TechNet, MS Learning, The ISV Show

Existing “Inclusion” Programs: Empower for ISVs, Emerging Business Team (EBT), Opportunity Management Center (OMC), Community Investment Programs, Microsoft Research’s Inspire Program, and Microsoft Research’s Request for Proposal (RFP) process

I am open to suggestions, just e-mail me at Brian.Groth@microsoft.com. I can't promise that I will reply to everyone, but I will certainly try.

A $20 Cookie for Katrina Victims

bgroth — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 22:07:00 GMT

Here is how I just paid $20 for a chocolate chip cookie:

Sara Ford works here at Microsoft
She grew up in Waveland, MS which was hit by hurricane Katrina
Her parents house was flooded and the entire community needs help
Sara decided to help
MSNBC contacted her about it
MSNBC then went and interviewed her parents
Sara is now collecting clothing and donations in one of our cafeterias from fellow Microsoft employees (like me), which she and her husband will deliver next week to Waveland.
That’s where I bought a cookie for $20. Sara and her friends tried to have me take more than one cookie, but I resisted the urge so that others could donate and get a cookie too.

Ahh, the power of blogs: I had never met Sara before today. I had never heard of Waveland, MS before this. I do have a weak spot for chocolate chip cookies though. [:)]

Balanced Scorecard

bgroth — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 01:20:00 GMT

I recently finished reading Balanced Scorecard Step-by-Step by Paul R. Niven and if you manage any part of a business, then I highly suggest reading this book. It’s pretty dry reading, but the concepts and how he guides you through it are very good. Of course, the most difficult part of putting together a balanced scorecard for your organization is coming up with the right strategies and measures. The book doesn’t really help with those two things. The idea if a balanced scorecard is aligning your strategies and their activities that you do to the overall vision for your company, organization, team, or even just an individual. Then identifying the leading and lagging measures for each strategy to know if it’s really working or not. Here is a very simple view of how I see it all fitting together, which is outlined nicely in the book:

Mission: Why we exist – defines our core purpose as an organization

Values: Our guiding principles – the values that we consider essential to achieving our mission

Vision: Description of our future that will lead to wins – explains our scope of business activities, how we will be viewed, where we will lead, and our distinct competencies

Strategy: Linking our distinct set of related activities to create unique value propositions

Strategy Map: Aligning your strategies with your activities and identifying their cause and effect relations.

Objectives: The individually measured activities that make up our strategy

Balanced Scorecard: The mechanism to track the achievement of the vision (Using measurement to capture the correct balance of skills, processes, and customer requirements that lead to our desired future as reflected in the vision)

The trick is to identify the cause and effect between the different activities. Do this with Leading and Lagging indicators, which means:

Lead indicators usually measure processes and activities.
Lead indicators are the measures that lead to (or drive) the results achieved in the lagging indicators.
Leading indicators should predict performance of lagging measures
Leading indicators are what set you apart by identifying the specific activities and processes you believe are critical to driving those lagging indicators of success.
Lag indicators represent the consequences of actions previously taken.

Or my overly simplistic way to put this another way:

Measure the objectives (activities) with lead indicators
Measure the results with lag indicators

What it comes down to is that every activity you do should have a valid business case that proves it is useful to achieve the associated strategy. If the activity can’t prove that, then it probably isn’t worth doing. That seems like common sense, but I'm sure many of us have worked on projects that never seemed to have any impact on the business.

Now just to throw a wrench in this great thinking of aligning objectives to strategy with leading and lagging measures, my wife pointed out the fact that “group think” at NASA was essentially the problem behind the two Space Shuttle disasters. Her point being that if a bunch of “business people” are focused on measuring everything and not listening to the engineers, then it could lead to serious problems. I hope to avoid that so that none of our Microsoft Technology Centers explode. It is certainly something to consider and keep in mind when I feel overwhelmed with metrics.

I am now trying come up with a good strategy map and balanced scorecard for our team, which is interesting since the book explains how to set up a rather large team to create a balanced scorecard – not just one person. But, it should be a fun project for me nonetheless.

XBox 360 Design Review

bgroth — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 21:42:00 GMT

A friend of mine (Alan Shen) helped develop the UI and pointed me to a good write-up of the process that went into creating the UI for the XBox 360. The article is at http://www.designinteract.com/features/xbox/

We don't own an XBox right now, or even a regular TV (just a PC running Windows XP Media Center Edition), but when the XBox 360 launches, we plan to get both a new TV and an XBox 360. I've seen it, and it's that cool.

Theo's Last Hop: Our Rabbit's Eulogy

bgroth — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 07:40:00 GMT

For some reason, I feel like sharing this with anyone who is interested:

Theo’s time was up, so today Lorie and I took him to the vet for his final visit, and we didn’t return home with him. He was almost 9 years old and due to some internal complications, he no longer enjoyed eating. And of course, eating fruits and vegetables, getting petted, and sometimes taunting Ripley (the dog) were his favorite things in life. Of course, he led a pretty great life for a bunny: sliding down slides as a little bunny, bouncing around and twirling in the air, watching ducks and sailboats from the houseboat, and later watching squirrels, birds, and the trees from the cottage. He also easily made friends: kids and Tonka trucks when he was little, stuffed animals as he got older, and Ripley later in life; although I think he liked the fact that Ripley only wanted to clean up after him. He also served as Lorie’s self-appointed guardian, selecting which boyfriends weren’t’ worth keeping by jumping on their heads in the middle of the night. Thankfully, that never happened to me – he just demanded parts of apples and bananas from me. He was also our wardrobe consultant; carefully selecting which shirts, pants, and belts needed to be simply tasted or full on eaten. He is survived by, and will certainly be missed by, his parents Lorie and Brian, and by his younger non-bunny-sister Ripley, who is still at puppy boot camp for trying to bite people, just like Theo would do if you smelled like a ferret.

Photos are at: http://spaces.msn.com/members/grothadventures/ under Photos, Theo. Or directly here, if this URL works.

The start of something exciting

bgroth — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 19:22:00 GMT

Watch Steve Ballmer's interview on Channel 9 to get an idea of how excited Steve is (and I'd say everyone else at Microsoft too) about the future of the software business and what it can do for the world. I know I agree! It is one of the big reasons why I enjoy working with the Microsoft Technology Centers so much: We show and help our customers glue their world together so software can help their companies do great things.

Life as a Support Engineer, circa 1994

bgroth — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 03:21:00 GMT

For me, some of the more interesting blogs I see from Microsoft employees are about “the old days”. In that spirit, here is what my experience was in 1994, which was the year I started working at Microsoft.

I was hired to support OS/2 LAN Manager for Microsoft’s corporate customers. I have since met people at Microsoft who worked on the code and who sold the product in the field – it seems like there weren’t many of us involved with it, but I’m sure there were. Eventually I also started supporting Windows NT 3.1, 3.5, 3.51, and 4.0 and somewhere in there I had the opportunity to connect debuggers to serial ports, but at the time I only knew enough to try a couple things and mostly get a dump of information to hand off to a more senior support engineer. Since LAN Manager was the core networking component in Windows 3.1, 3.11, Windows for Workgroups, etc. – I ended up taking quite a few calls from corporate customers regarding networking issues with those products too.

The fun started when I learned to use Network Monitor to troubleshoot problems with client logons, domain trust issues, and a variety of other LAN Manager and NTLM issues. I eventually became one of the main guys to go to for reading NetMon traces focused on SMB and NetBios. And yes, at one time I understood all those names and numbers returned from a “nbtstat –n” command (the NetBIOS Local Name Table) and how to look for those in SMB traces. It was fun because it was very geeky, very useful for troubleshooting, and not many people understood it. Oddly enough, about a year ago I even met one of the developers for the first version of Microsoft’s Network Monitor, and he confessed that he didn’t really know anything about networking when he wrote the code for it and that he really only understood what he was supposed code, not how all the pieces came together. I found that pretty weird, but I thanked him for the great work he did for this invaluable tool that I relied on.

This is also when I would ride my mountain bike about 10 miles into work most every day, even when I had a 24x7 shift (usually something like 1pm to midnight, 4 days a week). And this being Seattle (OK, my cubicle was Bellevue, WA at the time), it would often rain on me. When my shoes and socks were wet, I’d bring in a spare pair, but let my wet socks dry on top of my PC under my desk. I’m sure that gave a nice professional look to my cubicle! Biking home at midnight after my shift was done was fun though, simply because there weren’t many cars on the road and no other bikers.

Anyway, that’s what life as a LAN Manager Support Engineer at Microsoft in 1994 was like for me.

Microsoft Small Business Center, a Tablet PC, and a 5-year old

bgroth — Sat, 30 Apr 2005 10:15:00 GMT

A friend of mine has a very talented 5-year old daughter who has been using a Tablet PC to draw pictures. You can see her hard at work on a Tablet PC at http://www.helencards.com/. Her dad, Paul, has used Microsoft’s Small Business Center (was called bCentral) to make these available to anyone willing to purchase his daughter’s artwork. Paul was recently telling me how easy it is to use the Small Business Center to setup and run this small business, and it makes me want to dream up some business too, but I think I’m already busy enough with my day+ job.

Anyway, I have seen the cards first-hand; they are very nice and the drawings are very cute. See http://www.helencards.com/

Plus, the Commerce Manager http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/products/online/cm/detail.mspx stuff sounds like a great way to manage a product catalog and sell items on the Internet.

Life at Microsoft: you get to meet 5-year old girls who use Tablet PCs and their parents and friends who geek out over it. :-)

Demos and Evangelism

bgroth — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 23:55:00 GMT

Here are a couple of quick tips for those of you doing demos and generating excitement about your products, which many of us at Microsoft do, or at least try to do :-)

A book by Peter E. Cohan: Great Demo: How to Create and Execute Stunning Software Demonstrations
Guy Kawasaki's Top 10 Rules for Evangelism as transcribed by Paul Williams.

This is in addition to my Good Demo Tips entry back in January 2005.

If you know of other great resources, please add a comment to this blog entry.

Dogs at Microsoft

bgroth — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 03:12:00 GMT

And no, I am not talking about the discontinued “Microsoft Dogs” product, of which I actually bought a copy at our company store when we used to sell it. This is about life at Microsoft. I had my dog (Ripley) at work today, but unfortunately in the car (in a parking garage, so not too hot, not too cold). I would of course take her out for a walk ever couple of hours. At lunch time, I saw 3 other people out walking their dogs too! I also ran across a couple of people who didn’t look too happy to see Ripley, even though she was on a leash and behaving herself, which is pretty good for her considering she is a distractible 8 month-old. That might be why Microsoft’s official policy is to not have dogs (pets in general) at work, which I assume means in the office. Of course, Ripley is more like our daughter than like a pet – no offense to people who have real kids, but for those with 4-legged kids, I’m sure you’ll understand.

As I mentioned back in December, we have been working on a new version of our demo. So, the last couple of weeks have included some late nights at the office. To give my wife a break (she often works from home), I have been taking the dog into the office in the evenings, since nobody is around at that time I figure it’s OK. She sleeps peacefully on the floor as I work.

One more tidbit about Dogs at Microsoft is that we have an Exchange Public Folder dedicated to just that: dam, or Dogs At Microsoft. It’s there for no other reason than to be a social gathering place (online) for employees with dogs.

If you’re interested in seeing what Ripley looks like (and who doesn’t like to show off pictures of their kids?), you can see them on our MSN Spaces site at http://spaces.msn.com/members/grothadventures/

Look for a more interesting (or useful anyway) blog about my review of The Tipping Point book soon!

Ten Reasons Why Blogging is Good For Your Career

bgroth — Sat, 12 Mar 2005 05:59:00 GMT

Tim Bray, who works for Sun Microsystems has written up a great list of why blogging is good for your career . I completely agree and suggest you take a look at his list if you’ve been wondering the same thing.

Thanks to Michael Rys for pointing it out to me.

Blog Article in The Longview Daily News

bgroth — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 07:22:00 GMT

I grew up in Longview, Washington and was recently interviewed for an article (Local bloggers caught in the web) by the local newspaper there about local people (ex-local in my case) who have their own blogs. I don't think my quotes are quite accurate, but probably close enough. I did sort of ramble on in our interview. Anyway, it is fun to be in your hometown's newspaper. The real bummer is that he didn't put a reference to my blog in the article!