Now a quick caveat, I spent 3 years at MS… that’s a little while, but it’s not 20 years and my insights reflect that relatively limited experience, this is what worked for me, maybe you’re the same, maybe this is just an interesting set of datapoints about how other people think about things… either way I hope there’s value here for you:
How can you maximize value while you’re at Microsoft?
- Build networks: especially when you’re early in career, you’ve got at least another 40 years if you want it, the tech world is small, Switzerland even more so, chances are that you’ll interact professionally with others again. Create value for others by doing good work because this will follow you across your career.
- A side note: Beware not updating your previous impressions. I did an MBA 10 years ago, if I was to get back in a room with those people now, what preconceptions would I start with? What heirarchy would I expect to ‘naturally’ emerge? The cool kids, the ones who went to McKinsey, the ones who started companies and built empires. Despite knowing these people incredibly well 10 years ago, they’d be almost strangers to me today, in terms of their experience and their abilities. You learn and grow every day, so does everyone else. Update your priors… and leverage this to your advantage. Create value for others and they’ll engage readily in the future.
- Learn: MS has some amazing opportunities to learn, we all know the MOOC’s, they are exceptional. Do them all. There’s also a lot of mandated learning, don’t let that deter you from investing some of your time into building the skills you want to invest in. Chat with your manager, allocate time every week, build a habit. Microsoft gives you the space to learn, don’t waste that.
- Try something new. One of my highlights was speaking at the MS technical conference about “what’s not going to change in the next 10 years” with Emma Stephen. Was it a strictly technical talk? Not really? Was it something Dev’s need to think about if they want to deliver a great product, absolutely. Create value for others.
- Teach others: the one thing that will accelerate your learning the fastest is teaching others. Here again, you are creating value for other people. Learning on it’s own is actually pretty useless, it’s only when that learning is applied, when you do, that you add value to the world but that cool this is that you can 10x that really quickly, by teaching others what you have learned. You’ll understand it better and you’ll establish expertise (remember the bit about impressions above!)
- Understand the mastery curve: so my ballpark calculation is that it takes between 3 & 5 years to master customer success. There are a couple of dependencies: have you worked in CS before; do you understand how the company works and how your customers work? Some of this is experience based, but you pretty quickly run through the permutations of the problems you’ll need to solve. As you go along this curve, what you spend time on changes. In year 3 you’ll be able to manage your customers in 60% of the time it took you at the start, at year 5… it might be 20%. That’s how good you’ll get. So it’s important that you evolve with the role, it’s important that you shift to teaching, it’s important that you find passion projects that inspire you and do more than just add usage or seats, it’s important that you keep learning and trying new stuff because that will extend how long you can do this role successfully.
Stay tuned for the second part, later this week: How do you know when it’s time to go…
What Tim Learned at Business School 