PM at Microsoft (2005)

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/techtalk/archive/2005/12/16/504872.aspx

by tosh • 12 years ago

77 44 12 years ago

blogs.msdn.com

bunkat• 12 years ago

From what I hear, the roles are quickly collapsing at Microsoft. In the service orgs especially, the role that was previous done by a Test team is now handled by the Dev team. They are also increasing the ratio between PM and Dev (less PMs and more Devs) and many PMs are being asked to code in some fashion (prototypes and tooling). Be interesting to see how long the unique role of PM remains at Microsoft.

grouma3• 12 years ago

I work on Bing at Microsoft. What you have stated is correct. We have already done away with our test and operation teams. Moreover, a number of PMs were let go last week. Developers are now expected to wear many more hats. We are also reducing the number of middle managers in the name of agility. All good things in my eyes.

Another interesting thing to note is that we are trying to reduce the size of projects and break apart the notion of "cores" within an org. The idea is to allow features that span several different areas to be implemented with greater ease. I like the idea but I am concerned with how these features will be maintained after they are completed.

pbh101• 12 years ago

My impression is that most all developers have their own office at MS, or at least share an office with 1-2 other devs (not sure if this is different inside bing teams or not either)

Has this 'more-hats' change you describe (specifically ops) changed that at all? Where I work, I hear an argument against offices: that they promote and encourage isolation in what can be an ops-heavy role at times (I see the merits but think there are better ways to combat that)

My company is at orders-of-magnitude different size than MS, wondering if something similar occurs there.

SubuSS• 12 years ago

How is that working out?

FWIW - I spent about 7 years in MS and now >5 in Amazon - I overall like the MS model, at least from a developer perspective.

It gave you a lot of time to focus on getting your complicated piece right with unit tests - and you could leave the integration tests / PM'ing to the respective folks. Amazon is like where Bing is going - but the end result is that it ends up favoring breadth oriented folks more than depth folks. That's ok if you are building a business logic / app tier, system teams are a different story.

For the same reason, the latest MS path doesn't seem right to me. It feels like they are taking the wrong lessons from startups / AWS.

But again, it has been 5 years since and I don't have the big picture - so I guess I will wait and watch.

bcbrown2• 12 years ago

PMs are writing prototypes now? That's a huge change from when I was there (left in '11), when few PMs even had Visual Studio installed.

shanselman4• 12 years ago

Totally they are. Folks like MadsK and DamianE write TONS of code. Plus, now that we're doing all our work live on GitHub, the roles can easily blur.

randomfool2• 12 years ago

PMs writing code is a travesty- the PM role should trend much more towards UX. Devs can already prototype.

randomguy7788• 12 years ago

agree with this sooo much

tdicola2• 12 years ago

This was written almost 10 years ago by someone who was pretty polarizing inside the company (and ultimately left after spearheading the original vision for Windows 8), so take it with a grain of salt. Many of the recent MS layoffs have been in the PM organizations because the company is redefining the role.

alelefant• 12 years ago

Good point, the title of the article should be modified to include the year. Recent events make it sound like the story is changing.

antics• 12 years ago

Sinofsky was brought in as President of the Windows division after the failure of Vista, during which he spearheaded (among other things) Windows 7 and IE8, both to extraordinarily great praise.

Yes. He was divisive. Yes. He had failures. But really what you should do is take this for what it is: a successful person talking about success. The real trap is not that he is divisive or wrong about the future, it's that he almost certainly suffers survivor's bias.

randomfool2• 12 years ago

Windows 7 was a quick iterative release. He did a decent job, but there was little where things could go wrong. I firmly believe that IE8 was the worst IE release- no tabbed browsing, horrible accelerators feature and a bogus 'perceived performance' mantra.

Sinofsky's triad model is the epitome of Microsoft beauracracy- I left the company to escape it (I'd have put money on Sinofsky becoming CEO)

girvo• 12 years ago

IE8 was praised? God I hate that browser. The lack of anything remotely close to ECMAScript 5 makes me cry every day.

tosh• 12 years ago

I'd love to learn more about how the role is evolving at Microsoft. Anyone has pointers/stuff to read about this?

Encosia• 12 years ago

He had a couple high profile successes before Windows 8 too though (Office 2007/10 and Win7).

harryh• 12 years ago

This wasn't written by just "someone." It was written by Sinofsky who many thought would be CEO someday.

bcbrown2• 12 years ago

I never had a great impression of PMs when I was at Microsoft. The enduring image is, after asking a pointed question or raising an objection, watching some PM respond with a bunch of meaningless verbiage while nodding their head as if they're agreeing, when in fact they're disregarding every dissenting view.

That said, PMs at MS have a very challenging job, at least in the parts of Windows where I worked. The joke about MS being a bunch of separate orgs at war with each other was very real, and PMs were the ones who had to cajole, convince, and sell other teams on why they should spend their time doing something that would enable the PM's team to do something they wanted to do. They were the ones who chased people down and got them to agree to do something necessary.

kyllo5• 12 years ago

In other words they play the politics to free up the devs to focus on writing code. Yep, that's what PMs are for.

javierluraschi5• 12 years ago

Focus on getting rid of the politics, right? Otherwise you end up having to PM-up and hire more PMs to out-PM the other org. Fun times.

shanselman4• 12 years ago

This is almost 10 years old. The title should include the year.

codinghorror• 12 years ago

I don't know why this would be downvoted; I've been appalled to see things from 2012 on Hacker News arbitrarily edited to include the date, as if blog posts from 2012 were some kind of ancient lore of yesteryear.. whereas this article is from 2005 and doesn't include the date at all!

dang• 12 years ago

Thanks! Added.

cpeterso• 12 years ago

Steven Sinofsky's (post-Microsoft) blog is also a good read:

http://blog.learningbyshipping.com/

javierluraschi5• 12 years ago

My personal point of view: The Program Manager role should be replaced by more specialized roles, or no role at all.

I see PMs having 3 main responsibilities: Project management, user experience and defining requirements.

The problem with this role is that it's REALLY hard to find PMs who are GREAT at all these different skills.

I would rather have a project manager role, user experience researcher role, designer role, business analyst role, etc.

If the project is too small to define each position, then I wouldn't define a role but rather get people to wear multiple hats. There are devs that are very capable at project management, designers that are also good frontend devs, etc. Or bring external help to support the specific needs of your project.

mooneater• 12 years ago

There are specialized PM roles (source: had one).

jackgavigan2• 12 years ago

I think a problem with splitting the roles up is that you can sometimes end up with a leadership void, where lots of different people are responsible for individual pieces but nobody is responsible for the product as a whole.

There are a lot of project managers who can craft a beautiful Gantt chart but know very little about technology. There are a lot of business analysts who are very good at going to a user, asking "What are your requirements?" and then diligently writing down everything the users says and creating a beautifully-formatted requirements document, but who don't have an in-depth grasp/understanding of what the user really needs the product to do. That can bethe difference between a product that meets users' requirements and a product that delights the user.

I think you need to have a single person who is responsible for ensuring that the product should delight the user.

kyllo5• 12 years ago

I'm sorry, but "delight the user" is the most gag-inducing phrase in the software industry. Please never use it.

javierluraschi5• 12 years ago

Yes, I agree, there should be a "single person who is responsible for ensuring that the product should delight the user". But that person is the product leader, a single GM or whatever you want to call it, and the task should not be delegated to a team of PMs. Someone needs to oversee designers, user experience researchers, business analysts, developers, operation engineers, testers, etc. Thats the role of the person in charge and thats why they get paid so much. This person should also be accountable for "the product delights customers" piece, and if this doesn't happen, is also the person who gets replaced.

PM at Microsoft (2005)

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