Microsoft
In 2019, I completed a 12-week internship focusing on the Microsoft 365 new users onboard experience. Then in 2020, I accepted the offer to continue my work as a Product Manager 1 on the Microsoft Office Growth and User Lifecycle team. I am currently a PM 2 on the M365 Growth team. My work is centered around the growth and acquisition of M365 and how to optimize the user journey to make the experience more meaningful to customers, using Windows surfaces. Throughout my time at Microsoft, I have learned what it means to be a PM at an ever-growing and changing technology company. I did this while developing a personal process that ensures I look at all my work from a high-level perspective and at each step at a micro-level.
These are the steps I use throughout the PM process:
1: IDEATE
The first step in my process is pinpointing the problem statement. Then coming up with a few potential solutions that positively impact business, are a reasonable cost, and that address user needs.
2: RESEARCH
I always practice customer-focused thinking. Addressing the needs of the target audience is top priority in successfully designing a product. User Research is the best way to actually talk to customers and work with them to figure out their needs and the way in which they intend to use Microsoft 365.
3: DESIGN
Using customer insights, I now figure out how to best address what the customer need and design for what the customer does not even recognize that they want. Using the 7 principles of design, I look at the current user journey and through meaningful UX, I analyze and create UI to improve Microsoft 365 acquisition through Windows experiences.
4: DEVELOP
I lead a feature crew to ensure every aspect of the work is addressed and proactively developed. Engineering resources are important, so I work to make sure the work needed is thoroughly outlined to best utilize our engineering resources and time.
5: EXPERIMENT
While user research provides insights on how the user may interact with the product, we do not know the concrete impact of work until we experiment. I experiment with every feature I work on and analyze telemetry to decide if the work I did was a success. If it is not, I can use scorecarding to precisely target the weak areas and use the strong areas to help revamp the less successful metrics.
6: DO IT AGAIN
The most important part of the design process, is that is it never over. Once work is complete, we must always revisit it to see how we can even further perfect it and always view telemetry to see where we can iterate and improve.
Unfortunately, I cannot get into any more detail about the work I do at Microsoft, as I am under an NDA. If you would like to learn more, feel free to reach out to me at rebecnorth@gmail.com!