PM at Microsoft

re: PM at Microsoft

Doug Mahugh — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 02:59:54 GMT

Thanks for taking the time to write that up -- the historical perspective helps the role make more sense.

As an MS new hire, I've found roles/titles a bit confusing at times, and PMs in particular can be found doing a pretty wide variety of things around here.

re: PM at Microsoft

steven_sinofsky — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 04:44:00 GMT

Doug that is definitely the case. As always this is from my perspective and describes the PM role in Office (where it started).

Happy Holidays!

--Steven

re: PM at Microsoft

Roberto Islas — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 08:44:28 GMT

Thanks for the explanation of what exactly the job and responsabilites of being a PM in Microsoft. It could be a good idea to include some of your points to the www.microsoft.com/college. The information about PM in there is very incomplete. Happy Holidays.

re: PM at Microsoft

Sriram Ramamurthy — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 04:02:19 GMT

This is one of the best articles that I're read amout the PM position. Thanks for all the details and it definitely helps my preparation for a PM interview with MS in January. Meanwhile thanks for leaving comments in my blog.

re: PM at Microsoft

Sriram Ramamurthy — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 04:15:09 GMT

Oops sorry about those typos. If the PM role has so many responsibilities, then how does a good Manager draw the line between being authoritative and not being tough enough to make a decision for the feature team?

re: PM at Microsoft

steven_sinofsky — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 04:31:27 GMT

Sriram,

Of course in any job there is always a balance in exhibiting too much authority and being a team player. I think program management is much more about being a team player. At the end of the day the PM does not write the code or test it, so being able to be convincing and work collaboratively is the most important skill.

--Steven

PS: I only delete comments deemed inappropriate or unrelated. I sort of think of them as "letters to the editor".

re: PM at Microsoft

Adam Herscher — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 05:58:07 GMT

Thanks for the writeup, Steven!

Friends and family are constantly asking me what exactly a PM is - now I have something great to point them to!

re: PM at Microsoft

PM @ MS — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 06:52:29 GMT

This is an awesome write-up on what the PM does at Microsoft, and I am one. But this only reflects what a PM does in Office I guess and the other groups are vastly different and I mean a day and night.

I am a PM, and probably perform the role of a dev manager (as I lead a dev team of 30) and 4 PMs working offshore..but none of them report to me!!

To make things clear:
The "manager" in Program Manager is a misnomer as it means managing your own deliverables and not managing people like in other organizations. The PM title is common in the industry but the MS role matches closely to what a Business Analyst generally performs in the industry.(http://www.iiba.com/resources/papers/WhatIsABA.cfm)

And clearly, most PM roles are 8 to 10 levels below the management roles in the org hierarchy - so there is little chance of a PM to middle management growth in less than a decade given the size of each group.

my real 2c

re: PM at Microsoft

Sriram Ramamurthy — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 06:58:39 GMT

Steve,
I have often heard MS employees talk about the different flavors to the PM role like Design PM, Security PM, Release PM and so on.. Can u talk about these variants and are they exclusive to certain groups in MS?

- Sriram

re: PM at Microsoft

steven_sinofsky — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 08:23:02 GMT

b0rgbasher (deleted comment)

I'm sorry you don't like the way I try to keep things focused on what I'd like to discuss :-)

FWIW, I actually wrote this post on a machine running all alternatives to Office and Microsoft software which I often do. I don't think that is in poor taste, nor is it the topic of this blog.

--Steven

re: PM at Microsoft

steven_sinofsky — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 08:25:26 GMT

Sriram,

A PM plays many different roles throughout his/her career and sometimes during the course of one project he/she might be focused on one aspect of the project (Release or Security) but that would just be for hte project and overall even within those areas of focus a PM needs to be responsible for the full range of activities.

On our team we generally do not use modifiers on the title as you indicate above (with the general exception of localization where the job responsibilities are generally different).

--Steven

re: PM at Microsoft

steven_sinofsky — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 08:31:44 GMT

PM @ MS,

The link to your description is down, but I'm pretty sure that what I describe would not be a Business Analyst. The closest used at other companies would be a Product Manager, but not working on the demand generation or communications side but might work on "market requirements". Almost universally though these folks do not see the features from inception through to working with development and test (at least in my experience).

On the Office team a line program manager working on Office12 has either 3 or 4 managers between me and them, not 8 or 10 (and my manager reports to the CEO).

You are correct as this post describes the PM role in Office where the role originated. It has taken on other responsibilities and job definitions as appropriate to other products and technologies at Microsoft.

It definitely sounds like you have a unique role that I probably wouldn't characterize as a PM, at least by this description.

--Steven

re: PM at Microsoft

PM @ MS — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 00:04:42 GMT

From http://www.iiba.com/resources/papers/WhatIsABA.cfm

Also, Product Managers in my opinion, control the product lifecycle in many ways and are more empowered than a Program Manager at MS. Typically Product Managers are also higher up the food chain at MS :)

Cheers,

Definition of a Business Analyst:

Business Analysts are responsible for identifying the business needs of their clients and stakeholders, to determine solutions to business problems.

The Business Analyst is responsible for requirements development and requirements management. Specifically, the Business Analyst elicits, analyzes, validates and documents business, organizational and/or operational requirements. Solutions are not predetermined by the Business Analyst, but are driven solely by the requirements of the business. Solutions often include a systems development component, but may also consist of process improvement or organizational change.

The Business Analyst is a key facilitator within an organization, acting as a bridge between the client, stakeholders and the solution team.

Business analysis is distinct from financial analysis, project management, quality assurance, organizational development, testing, training and documentation development. However, depending on an organization, an individual Business Analyst may perform some or all of these related functions

re: PM at Microsoft

steven_sinofsky — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 02:13:29 GMT

PM @ MS I think your experience at MS is not typical (based on the reporting structure you outlined and your responsibilities). I am speaking from my experience at Microsoft of course (and so are you). To be clear, it would not make sense for a PM to manage developers (any more than it makes sense for dev to manage test, or for that matter sales to manage marketing -- an important organizational princple is having consistent rules where different disciplines come together in general management).

Typically in a "silcon valley" organization product managers report to the VP of Marketing and are not dedicated to the product per se or the developers. There is usually a product manager (managers) who write a "market requirements document" which is then handed off to "engineering" (typically in the VP of Engineering org). At that point the feedback loop is usually not well-defined.

Business Analyst is just not a title I have run across before. But the description you outline sounds very much like a valley product manager. The description sounds very "academic" and not like any structure I think could really work ("solutions driven solely by the requirements of the business" -- isn't that a tautology?)

At Microsoft a product planner most certainly is responsible for "identifying business needs" where "business" can be Microsoft's or the customers (i.e. strategy or solutions).

The key is that at Microsoft, the program manager is not only empowered but responsible for making sure the product is well-defined and well-executed in terms of the market and customers.

Often people want to define the "single person" responsible. That is another thing that works well when you have no scale or small things, but in general any product of substance is unlikely to have such a single point of failure or accountability. Even for Office, I work closely with my peers and my manager on issues that impact the broader Microsoft.

My experience has been that if you are sold in your job on "control" then you need to look carefully at what the actual scope is and not get too hung up on total control. More often than not, having a broad say in technology (that requires cooperation and consensus building on your bpart) is much more interesting, rewarding, and higher impact than having final say in every detail of a very small area.

--Steven

re: PM at Microsoft

Mike — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 21:03:10 GMT

Thanks for the post. I think this description explains a lot about the history of a PM. I think it also helps clarify some of how Microsoft needs to change.

As you aptly described, the PM role was initially created to better capture customer requirements and broad interdependencies when building software back in the early 1990s. The model you describe still may be necessary when projects are large. But times are a-changing!

In 1990, PMs were necessary. Technology was not in a position to help the flow of information sufficiently that a development team could be close to it's customers for large projects. There just wasn't enough time in the day to manage the information flow, communicate new plans, and get code written. However, since that time, the world has changed significantly. Thanks to technology improvements (email, web sites, automated support, scalability improvements, broadband, etc), developers can be involved in the design and development of a product, as well as in the deployment, operations, and support of their product. Why shouldn't data collection from customers be an automated process and part of every application? Why do we need to question which parts of the product are working well and which are not? Microsoft's crash-detection tools are a great example of this automation. Easy-to-build websites and customer feedback/FAQs/etc also ease this communication burden. Remember that back in 1990 the internet didn't exist and few had email. Communicating between groups was a difficult, paper-dominated world.

If a company were highly efficient, there would only be two groups in the company: those that build the product and those that sell it. In reality, all companies have overhead, which comes in the form of administration, payroll, marketing, etc. Improvement in any company is an exercise in never-ending optimizations and removing overhead. Technology is often the key to these optimizations. As such, the role of a PM as you've defined is one of these jobs which is being optimized out. Microsoft's competitors, like Google, are well aware of this, and you'll find few PM roles there, and only minimal overhead in their development teams. Granted, the Google model has yet to be proven over a 30 year history, but none can argue that their results so far have far out-paced the development speed of Microsoft's PM based model.

In my opinion, the role of a PM will eventually go the way of the dinosaur as software development becomes more efficient. Those companies which can't keep up with this change, will die out. I hope that Microsoft will not hang onto its past ways for the sake of posterity. Microsoft needs to evolve too.

Lastly, I'm definitely not arguing that the development process won't have planning in the future. It's just that the tools to do the planning and incorporate customer feedback are much simpler than they were 15 years ago, and they are getting easier with each passing day. As a result, these tasks will be folded increasingly into the developer's job, with supervision of fewer and fewer PM-type roles. A developer of the future will need to be able to do far more than a developer of 1990. In 1990, the developer just needed to write code. Today, and in the future, the developer needs to be able to understand business requirements, forsee future developments, communicate well in specifications, and write code.

re: PM at Microsoft

steven_sinofsky — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 22:34:03 GMT

Mike,

Thanks so much for the thoughtful comments.

We actually do all the things you talk about and find that they provide very good input on the current product and on how to incrementally improve products. Mechanisms like you describe are not necessarily representative of all customers and over-represent technical users quite a bit. Our customers are usually people that worry much more about their business or their products and do not have time to be experts on the technology direction of software and so their "solution space" is limited, which is why qualitative methods or things like surveys or asking for opinions are limited in the ability to uncover new and innovative things.

Our developers have access to all the data like Watson as well as our customer experience data (which you can think of as click streams for client applications) as well as all of our support incidents and of course all the newsgroups, blogs, press, and other activity regarding out beta tests.

I think that with even more data like this widely available I would draw the opposite conclusion and that is that even more planning and up front work is required and that a higher specialization will develop. If history is any indication, most of the times roles evolve to be more specialized and not less as more technology is developed that requires even more expertise to understand the information that comes from data.

I appreciate for sure that developers should be much more involved in the data and for us that is critically important. I know some program managers have a tough time when developers feel like the PM is not really justified in the decision and push PM back to uncover the data that drives a specific direction. There is plenty of data out there to make the right decisions.

You might check the job listings at some of our competitors for the title "associate product manager" and I think you'll see the beginings of our PM role though without the career framework I think we have at Microsoft. Just as with us, the role becomes more important as the number of decisions to make and amount of data to absorb increases :-)

-Steven

re: PM at Microsoft

Mike — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 02:04:47 GMT

Actually, I think history shows that you are wrong. Companies get more efficient, not less, and the barrier to entry on software development is decreasing, not increasing. This has been steadily shown over time. The new generation of companies is outpacing Microsoft with far less overhead.

For applications that want to be big and global, some of what you say is true, and these roles will expand. As a given product grows, it needs more people to track the details. Unfortunately, this necessitates that the project also slow down.

There is no doubt that the most impacting innovation and fundamental change will be done by much smaller teams where as much of the overhead has been removed as possible. When we've removed all of the overhead, the team can iterate much more quickly, and I believe the most important facilitator of change is the ability to iterate.

I doubt you and I will come to agreement on this. While you think that broadening of skills will yield more PMs, I think broadening of skills will yield fewer PMs because the work is replaceable.

The reason I see this is because large groups lend themselves to political issues - it is just human nature. To ignore it, or pretend that a company like Microsoft doesn't have it is being naive. Because of politics, PMs usually end up becoming filters of data rather than aggregators of data. And once the data has been filtered before getting to development, well, you've lost all chance of speedy innovation.

re: PM at Microsoft

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 21:05:31 GMT

Mike:

As a developer in Office, I see where you're coming from, but I disagree with you.

I'm a developer. I specialize in writing code. I do some customer research and look at their data streams (like Watson, SQM, and newsgroup posts), but that's to understand the customer enough to make good narrow-focus design decisions. For broader "we should add feature foo" or "changing bar would make people more efficient" I leave those up to the PM. I've got my own ideas, which I share with them (at length!), but I spend the majority of my time on semicolons, not business requirements.

On the other hand, a PM specializes in knowing the customer and knowing their requirements. The time that I spend focused on feature implementation they spend focused on feature design. Meeting after meeting where they meet with everyone who matters to the feature so they can figure out what the right design is.

When you talk about removing overhead, you're really talking about limiting scope. We can design and implement faster if, for example, we're only concerned about shipping in English. If we limit our target audience - say, focus only on the home user, or the student, or the guy at Boeing. If we don't worry about instrumenting with SQM and with group policy settings and with making sure everything works if all your drives are network drives.

By shrinking your scope, you reduce the need for a PM - targeting a smaller market means that it's easier for a developer to know enough about their customer space to be able to learn that in their spare time. And it reduces implementation time for the feature, so you can push products and features out the door sooner.

For better or worse, Microsoft won't do ANYTHING unless it covers every scenario for every market and customer. Everything is figured out up front so that we can meet all of these requirements while avoiding a late "oh crap, how can this work in a right-to-left reading language?" Well, in theory :)

It hurts us and it helps us. Joe Sixpack or Joe Blogs don't care if it works in Turkish, they just want to see a shiny web UI with a novel DHTML trick. But Joe Corporate does care if he can't standardize their Turkish offices on the same software they use in the rest of their worldwide company. We're late-to-market in many areas because we try to solve every problem at once.

Maybe if we limited our focus we could keep churning out shiny two-years-beta products, but I think one of our strengths is that when we get around to shipping something it does work for almost everyone in almost every scenario. It takes longer, but it also saves time - it's more efficient to do it right the first time than it is to ship something, then tear out the rendering code and start again because you can't make it work in RTL.

re: PM at Microsoft

Chris_Pratley — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 13:09:25 GMT

Mike, I'm a manager of PMs in Office and in addition to what "c" writes I would emphasize something that Steven referred to briefly in a reply to you: "We actually do all the things you talk about and find that they provide very good input on the current product and on how to incrementally improve products."

Note the "incremental improvements to current products". Automated data collection is going to tell you how to make small changes to your product to drive it toward optimal execution of what it already is designed to do. If your product is a database, you will get faster, more stable, and may even be able to optimize controls for reporting better based on automated feedback from users. But none of that will tell you that your customer is going to need to follow Sarbanes-Oxley reporting rules, and has to be able to provide an audit trail for their accounting that is linked to their document review systems. And what does that even mean in terms of changes or additions to your product, some potentially moving it into a different category altogether? Developers don't have the time or inclination or in some cases the aptitude to work out with the customer and other technology partners you need to integrate with exactly what capabilities need to be developed and what the user experience is going to be. That sort of thing is what PMs do.

I think "c" and Steven also made good points about how the increasing complexity of solutions being attempted and the simultaneous expectation from customers of increasing simplicity means the PM role is in even more need now than in the past. In the 80s and some of the 90s products were pretty simplistic and limited in capability compared to what customers expect now, plus you could design software for "geeks" and everyone else had to deal with it. Now, well, that doesn't cut it, and no amount of incremental improvement from automated data collection is going to fix that.

As "c" notes, if your product just does a single thing, like "search", then maybe incremental improvements are all that is needed if you just want to get better at that. But you might get blindsided by a competitor that is able to use PMs to change the rules. (e.g. maybe connecting people with answers is actually what customers want rather than just more relevant results?) That requires insight and collation of diverse types of data.

BTW, I think you can *easily* argue that Google has not outpaced Microsoft's model. Both companies have done great things, but you shouldn't confuse dribbling out a feature at a time with developing faster. Office 12 collectively delivers more functionality across a broader array of customer needs than what Google has done in 3 years of their own development. Don't forget that most of Google's properties were acquired (blogger, picasa, etc.) or are basic tools that merely match functionality offered by others (Froogle, blog search, etc) and differentiate by using the Google search tech. If we released each single capability of Office 12 one at a time we'd have a cool new shiny thing to talk about every week of the past three years. And the feedback on Office12 so far has been tremendously positive...radical improvements that come (in part) from PMs listening to customers and thinking deeply about the root customer needs - driving us to major overhauls and entire sets of new products as part of the Office system (SharePoint, OneNote, InfoPath, new Office server products, etc.)

re: PM at Microsoft

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 22:00:53 GMT

Chris and Steven: your commentary tends to be based around a large, mature, product like Office. what about markets where all the entrants are v1/ground floor? the comments above, and some of the comments on certain other blogs point towards the model of developing and shipping new ideas rapidly, and seeing if they stick in the market. in this model you would not need test or program management - but rather direct user feedback by using metrics such as instrumentation, downloads, buzz. can (should?) a startup mentality like that exist at Microsoft?

re: PM at Microsoft

Mike — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 22:26:44 GMT

Thanks for all the thoughtful comments. I am not quite sure what we are arguing about, though.

My point is that technology makes overhead easier, not harder. And as we move forward, although our markets are bigger and our scope is bigger, it is still overall easier to communicate and innovate than it was in 1990. If you don't agree that a company should have less overhead with better technology, then I'm not sure what to say.

My second point is that PMs are overhead. I'm not trying to belittle the role here, but I think it is important for everyone to understand. They don't sell product, and they don't build product. It is a role in the middle- managing process and facilitating communications. In all companies, some amount of overhead is required, absolutely. But over time, the goal for all companies is also to minimize overhead. That is just business, and so it will happen for the PM role as well.

re: PM at Microsoft

Rick Watson — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 04:10:12 GMT

Mike,

I'm a PM here, and as someone who's familiar with corporate discussions, I can say that if you're not selling, then you are overhead. This includes PM.

Development is not selling, ergo, they are in the same boat as PM. Just like the rest of Marketing.

re: PM at Microsoft

Chris_Pratley — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 12:08:04 GMT

a: I worked on OneNote from the very beginning (see link to my blog under my name), so that was a v.1 effort. You can read from the early posts in my blog about how we approached our v.1. I think one thing you are missing is that PMs are the ones who figure out "what" to build in order to get the feedback you are talking about. So they aren't unnecessary at the beginning - far from it. It sounds nice in theory to just have some "stuff" that you "put out there", but where does the stuff come from? It comes from some humans who dream it up and design the initial idea. We call them program managers (of course devs aso participate when they want to). And who interprets that automated data you mention to figure out what to improve? Program managers.

As for test, if you have a relatively trivial project (such as a mash-up) you can make a workable "beta" version without testers (using dev as initial testers), but nearly everything we make in Office and nearly all the rest of the company is not trivial even in "v.1". Products that do more than one thing have a large set of permutations that quickly outstrips the sort of casual testing a dev can do unless they basically become a tester. Beyond Office, there are lots of teams that follow a more rapid development model (and even a few less rapid) since they are working on projects that work better that way. MSN search is an example of something that is getting better every month (at least) due to incremental improvements. This is true of basically all of our web properties that are under active development. For a very different example, you can look at the flexwiki (flexwiki.com) project - something a few MS developers put together as an example of a very different sort of development.

Mike, I think you can define overhead many different ways. You're choosing one, but it seems arbitrary to me - and in any case I would include PMs in the "build the product" part, since if they weren't around developers would have to do the same work of defining what to build, meaning they couldn't write code. But all the roles are needed to maintain an organization that can exist over time in a healthy way. Is your spleen overhead? Your stomach? After all, you can survive without these organs if absolutely necessary - they neither operate your body nor move it to new places so they are overhead, right?

To your first point, I agree that a company that has not added any complexity to its operation and does exactly what it did in 1990 at the same pace should need less in terms of what you call "overhead" thanks to technological improvements. But work looks very little like 1990 anymore. Just about every company has had to speed up the pace of its operations, has had to customize its offerings to meet more specific customer needs, has had to optimize its processes to squeeze every cent out of its operation. All these tasks mean more "overhead", not less. But honestly, talking about Program management at this high theoretical level is not too meaningful IMHO.

re: PM at Microsoft

Silicon Valley Product Manager — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 04:49:06 GMT

I am curious why "program manager" is unique to Microsoft? This position doesnt exist in Silicon Valley.
What you described as roles and responsibilities for 'program managers' are covered here by 'product managers'. Usually product managers are primarily 'inbound' while 'product marketing managers' are 'outbound', but a company's particular culture will put a bit of spin on each. So what do 'product managers' at Microsoft do? I know they exist, I've met them. (And they are different again from product marketing in each region across the globe.) It would seem that Microsoft Product Managers are squeezed out? Or do they do the largely outbound tasks of 'product marketing'? And why does Microsoft also create positions called 'product planners'? Again a task owned by 'product managers' here. (I realize you will respond from your experiences at the company and may not generalize to all orgs in Microsoft).
Thanks

re: PM at Microsoft

steven_sinofsky — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 21:14:27 GMT

Silicon Valley Product Manager,

Good question! I don't know why the specialization does not exist in the valley in "title" though it does sometimes exist under the Marketing organization. As I mentioned, based on my experience I believe that the role (at least the way we define it) cannot be successful if it is subsumed by marketing (any more than test could be successful if subsumed by development, though both of those happen in valley companies quite a bit).

Product Managers (in Office) at Microsoft are focused on the brand, positioning, pricing and licensing, demand generation, press relations, corporate briefings, and a whole host of pre/post sales and marketing activities, not the least of which is coordinating our global sales force and how they sell and support Office.

Product Planners are a learning and research function. More on that later.

I think that as an organization matures it makes things that are implicit more implicit. Program management was a decisive step in that direction as we realized we were not being efficient with our developers (they were writing and rewriting the same code, they were not able to spend the time to make things usable, they were not in touch with customer but yet were responsible for being so and writing the code, etc.).

You might check out "Microsoft Secrets" or "Business of Software" by M. Cussumano that explain the role as compared to valley companies.

--Steven

re: PM at Microsoft

Silicon Valley Product Manager — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 05:32:08 GMT

Steven,

Thank you for your considered response.

But it has not slacked my thirst for an understanding of why Microsoft (at least Office)appears to have 'sliced the salami' of a Silicon Valley Product Manager into at least three components spread across the org: "program managers" handle the 'inbound' of customer requirements, dev decisions, etc.; "product planners" have some role in trend/issue identification with customer needs and product definition; "product managers" are mostly 'outbound' on pricing, positioning, and messaging. (Leaving aside the product marketing roles of demand generation etc. in specific regions around the world.)

Your response leaves me still hungry since it is empty fodder: it is based on logical errors of induction, deduction, and syllogisms:

Induction error:
"Observations at Microsoft show QA-Test reporting to Dev fail"
"QA-Test is a subordinated organization when reporting to Dev."
"Therefore all subordinated organizations fail"

Yet this induction is proven wrong by the deduction fueled by an existence proof that "both of those happen in valley companies quite a bit." One would expect that even by the law of large numbers, there are examples where QA-Test reporting to Dev is not a failure but is a success.

Categorical Syllogism:
"If Prog M reports to Marketing, it is subordinated to Marketing:
"All subordinated orgs fail"
"Therefore Prog M reporting to Marketing will fail."

Since the inducted categorical proposition is proven wrong by the deduced existence proof, the categorical syllogism that Prog M reporting to Marketing will fail is also false.

In fact, the established & proven successful model for Marketing is ownership of the "4Ps: product/packaging, pricing, promotion, and place." (Regis McKenna, Bill Davidow, Jeffrey Moore, etc.) There has to be one-spot where there is the "soul" of the new machine--market trends, issues, customer requirements, product planning, feature-functional rationalization with dev, critical decisions about feature cuts as the bug regression trend collides with launch timelines, outbound tactics, in general the responsibility of making sure the product meets expections, delivers, and is successful, etc."

I am concerned that Office-Microsoft's chopping up of the responsibilities, authority, and accountability only sets up a machine that is suboptimal by risk-aversion and incrementalist since the balkanized org optimizes decisions for local maximums rather than a global maximum.

Surely your point of program management being a "decisive step to make the dev side of the org more efficient" is just such a potential example: the global maximum of increasing shareholder value by taking some risks with new products and services is sacrificed for "dev efficiency"? False idols! Advancements in high tech are messy, hardwork, and need lots of good luck. "Dev efficiency" seems a third-order issue at best.

I am aware of Jon DeVaan's efforts to better integrate marketing with engineering to reduce the impedience mismatches and reduce the local optimizations at the expense of increasing shareholder value. Where has that work gone in Office?

Regards,
An Even Hungrier Silicon Valley Product Manager

re: PM at Microsoft

steven_sinofsky — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 09:57:26 GMT

SVC PM,

Sounds like you have some misinterpretations of what I'm saying and also that you work at Microsoft, so how about asking more directly internally so we can have a conversation made up of more context since it sounds like you have more issues than just how I'm describing the job.

To be clear, this is not about slicing things up--you make this sound like a zero sum game and that there is only so much work to go around. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Rather this is about growing the amount of specialized work we can do. While you might claim data points to the contrary, the benefits model of having these roles be specialized is not just one I am asserting, nor are the challenges and risks that a lack of specilization assertions, but rather the data does support these. That is why I pointed you to a third party resource rather than have me just keep on trying :-)

But again, as a Microsoft employee you have a much easier time contacting your managers and executives directly where you can get much richer answers to your questions based on specifics that neither of us can share in a blog. That is why I always encourage people who already work at Microsoft to use the tools and people you have available to you.

--Steven

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re: PM at Microsoft

kabir_khanna — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 11:51:09 GMT

While it may seem like an overhead , the role of a PM is definitely one. It is a more specialized role which has evolved over a period of time as the scope of software to solve problems has become larger and larger. While a college graduate can single handedly do his/her final year software project work the approach is not scalable when you have to design software for a much larger audience and when the cost of error is large. It is unrealistic to say that is the PM neither develops software nor sells it , it is an overhead. Consider for example the role of a movie director or that of a music orchestrator. While neither of them actually act of play the music their role is extremely important for the movie to succeed or the music to not sound like noise. Yes, you can say that all the super talented actors are mature individuals who should also understand not only how to enact a scene, but rather in what sequence things happen, get everyone to agree on common creiteria, etc. Do you think that can work ? Has the role of a director been phased out over the years in order to reduce the overhead. This is the age of specialization. Specialized roles as these pay up many times over for the cost/time overhead you might suspect they may be adding.

re: PM at Microsoft

kabir_khanna — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 11:53:09 GMT

Minor correction, in my previous post I meant Role of PM if "NOT" an overhead and not that it is. Sorry for the typo.

re: PM at Microsoft

Student — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 03:49:45 GMT

Thank you for your detailed description of what a PM does. As a graduate student who likes to become a PM I have the following questions:

1. Do PM’s get to choose their mentor and bond with them, or are they assigned one at the beginning that shall remain with them till the life of the project?

2. You mentioned that an in-depth knowledge of technologies is needed to enhance the projects performance rather than re-invent the wheel. How do PM’s acquire this knowledge?

3. Some companies want a percentage of your time to be spent on pet projects; Do PM’s have this opportunity as well?

4. Can PM's work flexible hours like developers?

5. What are the growth potentials and career advancements for a PM?

Student

6.

Beauty and the Geek

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Today I present guest writer Brad Weed, Product Design Manager of the Office Design Group. He leads the...

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re: PM at Microsoft

Christian Buckley — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 05:12:58 GMT

Steve,

I just came across your entry (thanks for providing this insight into the PM role, by the way), and as a new Sr. PM hire (starting in 2 weeks) I was found the comments interesting. I wanted to comment on the difference between the PM and Business Analyst roles.

At my last company, I managed a team of PMs and Business Analysts. While there does seem to be some overlap in the roles, the primary difference is that PM's manage execution, while the traditional BA role is around definition. Also, BAs move vertically -- usually working with specific business units or technologies -- while PMs work across many teams and technologies, focused on getting a solution out the door. It's process vs. project-centric roles.

Some view the BA role as junior to the PM, but more often than not I've seen BA's move into data analyst or other technical roles. It's a different mindset. Very few BAs make good PM candidates, in my experience.

re: PM at Microsoft

kayte — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 08:29:47 GMT

Wow this was a fantastic entry. I'm actually considering a PM role at the moment and got some really good insight and flavour on the role of a PM.

I'm bookmarking this one.

Cheers

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Microsoft Live Search Core Relevance Program Management Director Eytan Seidman Moves On

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Eytan Seidman, Program Management Director over core relevance for Microsoft Live Search, is leaving Microsoft (and Seattle) after six and a half years and heading to New York to work on a travel-related start up with his brother. I talked to him about

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Steven Sinofsky's Microsoft TechTalk : PM at Microsoft

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While at Stanford this week I was asked by a number of PM (program manager) candidates to talk about the PM role at Microsoft. The PM role is unique to Microsoft and was actually created in response to developing software that is more usable and at th

Creating a New Breed of PMs at Telligent

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Don't tell my dev team's but today is the first day I've felt like I could catch my breath since taking on the challenge of building up a Program Manager foundation at Telligent. That means that it's a good time to talk about what I've been working on

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感谢所有发表评论和给我发送邮件的人们。我非常欣赏我们所开始的讨论。当这个博客开博的时候，在我们的走廊里大家都摩拳擦掌。介绍Windows开发团队看起来会是一个不错的开头。本篇日志就将提供这个团队的概况

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