 this is Christian Buckley doing another Microsoft Buzz Chat interview and I'm here today with Mr. Chris Slump. Hey Chris. Hi. So folks that don't know you, why don't you introduce yourself, who you are, where you are, what you do? Okay, well so this is profiling Microsoft employees, right? So I guess how to talk about my Microsoft creds I suppose. I've been at Microsoft about 20 years so this is my first real job really out of college but I think most people know me as probably one of the biggest Yammer fans in the world because I was running the Microsoft Yammer network for about four years there. I took two years out and I think that's about where we met, right? Yeah, I think we ran into each other while you were doing the network stuff and for folks that don't remember too is that after the acquisition and Microsoft had various community activities in different places and they kind of pushed all of that activity over into Yammer and a lot of those communities are still there and thriving and doing well but of course then they went they wanted to expand beyond that they built out the tech community which is on a completely different non-Microsoft technology. But anyway yeah so you were you were gone for a while so you went out into industry. I had the yeah I had the startup itch and and scratched it good so so I was with Carpool Agency for a couple years and and I learned a massive amount in two years and I'm so thankful for that bunch there, Jeremy and the gang. I learned a ton but circumstances changed. I found an opportunity this was actually so being a customer success manager which is my current title is something I had been coveting for years. So since I first met the Yammer team they had customer success managers and I just loved the concept of the role. It was kind of that sweet spot between techie and customer facing and that I just really loved and so I kind of fashioned my role within Microsoft to be like that for you know for Microsoft employees essentially. You know it's interesting is that actually came up in a tweet jam today conversation talking about how you know with the covid quarantine going on and and the work from home that it has really again surface the reality is that organizations need to have that CSM function. It is just so important there's you can't just go and maybe you could give us a little background of what that role is and how you oh yeah because my point that I made in that discussion was you cannot simply rely on the tools to put in security protocols and compliance and then just assume that hey everything is gonna gonna work you know right well and not and not just that it just works but that that people are actually gonna use it right so and get the most value out of it. So you know I mean let's so we can actually fast forward a little bit to what I'm doing now because it kind of explains it so I found found a position they had to create a bunch of these customer success manager positions all over the world back about films three years ago now and my wife is Scottish there was a position in based in London but I said hey can I live in Scotland they said that'd be awesome and so here I am so what I'm doing is looking after all the public sector customers that we have in Scotland that's kind of my remit and with my kind of hero customer right now being the NHS for obvious reasons so that that's the National Health Service here so so my job is to make sure that they are using everything that they own and most people so I'll get back to where I had why I headed down this path let's be honest most of these people especially in the public sector were buying off at 365 to get cheaper email right now it was just cheaper to run it right you know and most people that don't know that too that are kind of late comers on this the cycle but yeah email was for years was the primary motivation for organizations to move over to office 365 right right and and to be honest that hadn't changed very much especially in cash strapped organizations that hmm how to say this delicately weren't particularly innovative right they were so a lot of folks in public sector like they're just trying to get their job done and trying to do it efficiently and they do hero work don't get me wrong but they're very cost-conscious and and so that's really what they were trying to do in a lot of senses COVID has changed all that so this has been another wake-up call to them to say wow we need to we have to transform we're being forced to transform and some of them don't even know what that means or looks like right now and so my role is isn't really about technology I spend a lot of time talking about it and helping them through that and training and those kinds of things but it's really the people side of the change it's the culture change it's the mindset shift it's the you know how do we I host hackathons right at a customer site you know bring the customers in and say kick it out of the room or if you can you know you want to be a wallflower and watch that's great but let's get the business people around show them the basics of how to use some of the toolbox and turn them loose and say okay what is what are the business problems you're facing let's focus on the business problems and let that lead the conversation not the tools yeah it's all about the tech intensity you know I know that's I know Satya Nadella brought that up but we had the partner conference you know earlier this month and so that was the new verbiage the new term that used which is really kind of that you know his Satya's description of the kind of the evolution of the the business transformation you know what you're talking about it's getting it's beyond just a deploy it and we have these other tools but to get people thinking about you know the individual or team-based transformation how do we start leveraging this to do more to do it faster to do it better so so really starting to you know not not just expect IT to come in put something new on my system and then back away and I just I figure things out but otherwise work the way that I've always worked but to really embrace the transformation yeah well if you want if you want a new Satya buzzword or buzz phrase this is what we're talking about most often right now but I do love it because it speaks to my role so well so what he talks about now is respond to this crisis right respond recover and reimagine so people get they get it right when you're saying okay I got to respond I got to react I've got to turn on teams where I was dragging my feet before I've got to turn these things on to respond to what's happening here to people need to work at home now we need to recover so now we need to kind of make sure that we're doing it right make sure we got security in place make sure we got our governance in place those kinds of things but now we have an opportunity to reimagine as well because there's a new normal and we're not even we're still not even sure what that looks like but we need to be able to reimagine really think differently about the way we've done business which makes sense you know for years and years and as you know my background the SharePoint space and working with migration and administration tools with these these ISVs we'd always talk to clients about this to say look it's not just a the term that's used in the industry is the lift and shift it's not just moving what was broken worked okay but not optimized over to the new stuff but still not quite working not optimized for that you look at a migration as an opportunity to go in and relook at your data relook at your governance your compliance your security kind of all those aspects are we meeting our needs there what is our change management policies around this but then to also go and look and say okay this is how we're doing it today is this the best way of doing it are we fully leveraging the technology that we so what's interesting Chris I know I think we've actually talked about this years ago I started my career as a business analyst one of the things I used to always talk when I early on as I started presenting going around the conferences I would talk about some of those earlier the early experiences as a BA but I say well when's the right time to to introduce new technology when you're trying to define business outcomes in and capture requirements with customer group because if you ask them for the requirements without them being aware of the new technology that you're thinking about implementing then they'll give you their requirements through the lens of their current understanding of what the system can and cannot do but the opposite is that if you show them all the new stuff and you ask them for their requirements and then they start dreaming up all of these scenarios which may not be you know anchored in reality of what they actually need will actually improve and the right answer you know as is there can be a right answer is more of an iterative approach to those things to move people through it's it's the define what it is here's what here's how we improve this get them up to that new level and say all right now based on your where this is let me show you what else we could do it have you let's start exploring kind of the next phase I mean I look a lot of the CSM role as that as you know it's a BA function in some regard yeah yeah I would I would say so I think I think we do try to get up to a more strategic level right to to say how you know so power platform is a great example right so I was thinking about this earlier when you were saying you know how we we think of what we currently have our legacy our legacy and we just want to lift and shift and move it in rather than rethink it one of the classic examples is you know an organization I was talking to that said oh we can't we're having trouble moving to Windows 10 because we have to consider all these legacy access databases or something about access database there's a new way and but it's a in some cases it is a big leap right so you know because they haven't spent a lot of money I had the latest access updates what are you talking about that's the latest tech technology I'm sure there are still use cases for access really man I'm sure there are but yeah but they've spent so much time and money and effort in maintaining these databases that are sitting on people's machines that they don't see if they could just redirect those funds so they think of for example the seat you know investing in CDS and the whole the common data store behind power platform right so they think of that as a net new investment when really it should be completely changed they shouldn't be investing any of the time the local access databases and instead doing this common data store or the new rebrand the new data flex yeah the come data store what are you talking about I don't understand that as soon as I heard hear the new product name I the old names are dead to me and I just I don't recognize them anymore it's not confusing at all to people drinking the Kool-Aid well yeah but it's no it's right it's it's I mean that look there's always you know I moved from a BA or early on to into the PM function and that you know the difference between those where a business analyst is focused largely on understanding what the business needs are understanding with the technical capabilities are and helping the business to to to envision what could be and then to move into that point where a PM's function is much more of the work with the BA there's the plan of attack make sure that that first phase which we said would be in six weeks ends in six weeks on time on budget everybody on board meet all the outcomes and then we move on to the next phase part of that go ahead yeah well one of the big differences between a BA role and a CSM role for anybody who's interested in the in the career path is that a CSM has so we sit in a sales organization that's not true with for every enterprise that does this role but we do we don't we're not metric on sales however but we are we do carry a goal like we carry a metric that we have to hit and that's not you're generally true of a business analyst which is much more of a cost center kind of function right so so for a CSM we're actually metriced on how many people we get using you know the different workloads yeah that's it which is I mean I look I always I mean I carry the title of you know evangelist of technology evangelists for years and I mean I looked at the CSM role I said in a lot of ways it's a very different ways I mean evangelism is probably more on the business development side of things kind of between quasi between product sales marketing operations but you know I think it was more akin to the CSM role just not in a in a different space but you know same same kind of thing it's it's yeah anyway I I think as people are you know thinking about these different roles you can't get hung up on the titles or where it sits exactly and that's why I say there's a need for a CSM type function whether that person sits in support I've seen them sit in training and leadership development in larger organizations and then there's other organizations where they could be an office manager slash marketing person slash CSM they're in a smaller place they're doing kind of all of those different roles sure the important thing is that you have somebody that's looking at that and asking those questions of you know are we getting the most out of what we have in place how can we improve yeah yeah and it takes a certain so good CSMs have a high need to help people so so that's why a lot of times the will be aligned to support and and we've actually just done an alignment internally to bring more support resources closely aligned to the CSU so there you go but so what was I going with that yeah I just to your point about don't get hung up on on titles I just know what drives me and it's problem-solving trying to help somebody be successful and you know and I kind of lean technical but I'm not a coder I've tried that I know I'm not that so I try to stay in that sweet in that sweet spot so yeah it's a good place to be I mean that the micro space look there's obviously you still have with build and the dev focus and there's you know Satya again a couple years ago like you know every company is a software company because you need to go in and a lot of that is that you know that with the power platform a lot of these power user summer referred to them as rather than power user as kind of makers that make her you know way of thinking of going solve problems on your own me look I've worked in companies I work years ago with with Cisco and others where a business analyst was a very senior role and they were going in and building you know piloting they were doing a lot of that you know just one step below the engineering team and kind of build out the solution so they hand over something that is you know two-thirds of the way complete and saying go make this so that it scales and can be supported across the organization but here's what it will look like and and I've piloted out and this should be correct so again it's you know I just because I've worn the be a title and not formally the CSM I refer to that but but like you said it's regardless of the title it's kind of that you hear the functions and I it's very very similar but well interesting so it's maybe you could talk about you know the shift inside Microsoft around this role because I know you had like the DE or DX team and you had a lot of people that had evangelism in their title those went away some have kind of snuck back in CSMs like famously you might not know about this if you're watching that you know that like the CSM unit that was originally came from the Yammer organization but they were like cut across the board and people found other roles but now you have people that have CSM titles back in the company so kind of what's happening what's been the learning inside of my you know there are legends so I'm not you know I'm not going to not gonna throw out names or things that where I don't have hard concrete evidence but so essentially what happened from my point of view is that the the CSM role had a hard time finding a home within the office world where it started with from the Yammer acquisition right it's having a hard time finding a home organizationally within Microsoft to set it up for success because they were continually kind of moved from one cost center essentially to another you know whether it was sales and marketing or part of the engineering team or they couldn't really find a place for it and that's I think ultimately why it was just completely disbanded because they just couldn't justify they couldn't tie it to some concrete value right they couldn't figure this out somewhere along the line and and by the way that was kind of because I love that role so much when they disbanded that team that was the last straw for me I was kind of figuring out whether I wanted to stay at Microsoft and what I wanted to do when they did that I'm like no done because that's what I was going to do so I thought they had just lost interest in it so but somewhere in that two years that I was out someone joined and that's where I can take some guesses but I'm not sure who exactly someone got religion basically around customer success and they realized that in a consumption world we have to have somebody working directly with our customers that is gold on and focused on consumption or we're going to start they're going to start peeling away to Roland and Salesforce and so so they finally got it and created this massive organization kind of all at once and so and that was massively disruptive to the whole field organization trying to figure out how that role and a consumption rhythm fits with a sales rhythm and so there's been some growing pains for the last couple of years but but yeah I think we're in a pretty solid space right now and you know Amy hood frequently making reference to customer success and how important that is all that in her keynotes and things so we feel like they get it and we're in a good place that's great you know because it certainly wasn't being on the outside to be part of the partner community you know it you're looking in when they made that decision and over that that time it's great they figure something as you know there were some people that remained inside of Microsoft and went into other roles but we're still kind of doing that same thing and then kind of come back into that but it's a DNA man but it's one of those things I think from the outside where we like I think we all called it you know we're like Microsoft you're making a mistake it's neat like I get it if it's not tied to specific you know KPIs if they can't measure it you know and I just think that they took the extreme decision without really thinking it through there's a I'm a which which happens and and they've learned from that they you know and it may be that that the end goal that they finally read do a smooth transition they just needed to cut and start over and you know fully plan it I don't know I don't know that piece how the transition happened I'm just glad I did yeah yeah no it's all good it's you know that changes happening within Microsoft I mean one of the indicators and I hear I'm wearing my you know that I had like the partner discussions this morning wearing my build t-shirt you know we were talking about how you know when changes happen inside of Microsoft is you look at what they share publicly about like what the commitments are at the individual and team level after the fist when the start of the fiscal year when the internal meetings have happened and they said okay for the next fiscal year here's what we're focusing on and when they started focusing on consumption and adoption and other metrics which you know were foreign for all the time and and being part of the original the back towards the start of what is now office 365 and you know when I joined in 2006 was there for three and a half years and kept saying you know you're you're focusing on selling the net new licenses when they renew their EIAs they're not going to renew because they're not using it there's not not seeing the value it's going to hurt us we need to help them to utilize what they have and it took a while so when you started to see those metrics you know on the the metrics for sales people and the CSMs and all this I think it was and in the product team as well it's not just about that here's the five new features that I helped launch in the last year it's the what's the data showing are people actually using this are we building the things that people are actually finding and using which is fantastic yeah yeah and you know it allows me to focus on what I want to focus on which is solving people's problems and not worrying about the sale right I can do the right thing for them right well so I know that so you're in a beautiful part of the world I am very envious of that I love it up there I I was thinking of you just an hour ago when I was having a an epic fish and chips supper so love that without a real piece of fish yeah I'm sure no for people that don't understand the fish and chips you get in the states like yeah I was in so one I just did to my bona fides here is that my my maternal side of the family there were my so my grant my maternal grandfather Richardson 15 generations did not move from Edinburgh so like back to 15 generations my 14th great-grandfather whatever there's a 15th great-grand so like you know more than that whatever changed the name from Rikas and to Richardson I don't know why need to go and dig into that but love the area as you know I mean we lived in Seattle for 12 years and so some similar weather patterns and stuff I love that I appreciate that but the last time I was there with my good friend Mike Watson was living there in Edinburgh and we did we drove up north and he was in the process of renewing his license so I don't license so I had to drive some narrow roads up in that part of the world yes yes but we went up into the you know up into the the locks and drove around and it was just just amazing yeah loved it loved it yeah no people you know for the first several years people would ask me what I miss about the states and honestly I mean there's food things I could go into you know for everybody though the one thing the answer that interests most people which is the honest truth is the main thing I miss the most is wide well maintained roads yeah well hey look I so I live in you know in Lehigh Utah and as you know how wide the roads are here it every time I go to like Seattle or something I complain these roads are so narrow you know everything for people they don't know to in Utah the roads are really wide because when they develop the area it was like it when they started the pioneers came over it was after the first of several Chicago fires big city fires so they built them extra wide not because they envisioned the future traffic it was fire breaks it was I did not know that to be honest yeah yeah so they learned those lessons in the city planning and it just worked out that you have like six lane roads and greater in downtown Salt Lake City is because a lot of those lessons landed that way from the Chicago wow there you go well great well Chris you know people want to find out more about you get in touch with you how do they find you are you doing stuff in the socials you know it's it has definitely decreased lately I have to be honest with you it's just been it's been manic you know learning a whole new actually adjusting to working in the field in the Microsoft field was even a bigger adjustment than working to a new country yeah it's heard it's very different it's a totally different world so and there are people that are in the long time in the field at Microsoft and they go over to corporate and they're like I don't like this and they want to get back in the field yeah it's just it's a different personality yeah it is so but I am more active on LinkedIn now than I am on Twitter so so just search I don't think there's too many Chris lumps on on LinkedIn so you'll be able to find me there and but I am on Twitter so that's CSLE excellent well hey really appreciate your time today and enjoy the rest of your evening is it raining or windy today or is it you know it is rainy very gray today but we're expecting 80 degrees almost tomorrow so don't say that I like the rainy and windy part I like we get we get a day of summer and then back yeah no I look I've been there in the summer and is beautiful I I prefer that but you all enjoy the countryside there I know I very envious I look at the pictures when you guys get out and travel and post stuff to the social so go go have some fun but thanks a lot for your time today yeah well likewise