 It's The Cube. Here is your host, Jeff Crick. Hi, Jeff Crick here with The Cube. We are on the ground at the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Awards 2015 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. We're really excited for our next guest, an award winner, Julie Larson Green from Microsoft. Welcome. Thank you for having me. Congratulations on the award. It's super exciting. It's really great to be recognized with all these amazing women. So what are some of the great things you're doing that they said, Julie, we got to give you the award? Well, I've been at Microsoft now for 22 years. I've spent a lot of time in my career working in lots of different parts of the company. I've been fortunate to be part of some of the biggest product moments in our history and helped lead design and product definition for some of those. And now I'm in a new role called Chief Experience Officer, which I get the opportunity to look out across our products and think about ways that the trends that are happening in the industry and the things we can do to bring our products closer to how people are working and living today. And it's a really exciting new kind of role. So it's interesting. We did about 900 executive interviews last year. And I don't think I can remember one other Chief Experience Officer. So a new role. And really, you wouldn't put the C in front of a role like that unless it was A, really important, and really kind of overarching. So when you talk about experience, dig down in that a little bit deeper. What does that mean? So what I'm doing is I'm looking at not individual products as much as how they connect together. So how you can use our products in a combination. The real goal in my mind is to have you stop thinking about the tools altogether. Stop thinking about the next app you need to launch and really let you stay in flow of the work that you're trying to get done and have total surface capabilities to you. So instead of thinking all the tasks you need to do, you're thinking about the thing that you're trying to accomplish. Right, which must be very different because you said you were part of some of the major products in Microsoft. You've been there for 20 years. Yeah. You know, I'm sure it used to be the office guys and the server guys and the OS people. I was one of the OS guys. Yeah. And now the role is really to bring that together into an end to end kind of experience. Right. And talk about, you know, kind of Satya's, you know, he's been there for a while now kind of his, putting his imprint on the company and how that's changing things from, you know, Balmer had been there a very, very long time and probably represented more the stacks of applications versus Satya coming in with more of a cloud focused as your chief experience officer. Sure. How's he really kind of helped change the culture of Microsoft? Well, Satya has really been about inclusion and about opening up the conversation and thinking differently. And I think that's a big part in both the way we shape our organizations and our teams and how we think about people of different personalities, different races, people with different challenges, men, women and trying to bring that together. So the products that we create can also be more inclusive of the people that are buying them. Right. So it's not just people that have a computer science or mathematics degree building products that people with mathematics and science degrees like, but can really touch all parts of humanity and what people are doing with technology. So it's opened up a lot of conversation and it's been a really fun and exciting, you know, there's many ways to solve a problem. So we're trying many different solutions to find the right one now. Right. And talk a bit about your journey at Microsoft, you know, probably not majority women there. I'm guessing, I don't know for a fact, but you know, your early days when there probably wasn't as many senior women in high positions and how has that changed over time and how has Microsoft both formally and informally tried to change the culture there? Sure. For me, I think early on, I was a programmer before I came to Microsoft and then I started the Visual C++ team. I think I was the first or second woman on the team at the time. It didn't seem that unusual because growing up, I didn't have brothers and I just had sisters and there wasn't boy tours and girl tours or just chores. And so I didn't, you had to find a way through it. And so I've always thought that, you know, I can all, willing to ask for help. I'm willing to try anything and see how it works and then go back to the drawing board if I don't. And that has kind of served me out through my career, creating connections with people, you know, really, you know, taking risks and assuming good intent on the other person's part. And that can lead to really great solutions. Right. What about kind of mentorship and the role of mentorship or sponsorship? Did you have any great mentors that, you know, you're either looking up to or looking out for you? And how important was that in your career? Mentorship, I think most of my mentors didn't know they were my mentors. They were just people that I observed and I saw something about them I liked. So if I was working on how to run a meeting, this person did a nice job in the meeting, this person didn't do a nice job in the meeting and I don't ever want to do that. This is how that made that feel. So just observing in the day to day work, the things you like and don't like and the skills you wish you had, and then those are good people to reach out to as mentors because they have got something that you want to learn. I've also been lucky to have, you know, one-on-one mentors or nearly sponsors that have really helped me with my career and been a safe place to go and discuss challenges or ask for advice on how I showed up and that's a really important thing. That's great. So last question, looking back now that you've been at Microsoft, like I say, 20 years, what advice would you give to somebody who's just, you know, they're just coming out of school. We talked to the student vision award winners. They're just getting ready to start on their journey, coming into Microsoft and, you know, they happen to sit down next to you at the table. What advice would you give to them? Well, I would say two things. One is, do what you say you're gonna do. So it'll be that reliable person on the team that says what they're gonna do. Don't over-promise, don't under-promise, just promise, and make sure you become someone that the team can rely on to get things done and you'll grow over your responsibilities. The second one is I would say is people often worry about, you know, called work-life balance or how do you have it all. And I think it's important to think about what all means to you and then work towards it. Be deliberate with your time and deliberate with your choices and where you spend your time and then you'll be satisfied with your career and your life. Very good advice. I like it, because there's no such thing as work-life balance. It's just called life. It's just life, right? And define what all means to you. Exactly. All right, well Julie Larson Green, winner of a Women of Vision Award from Microsoft. Thanks for taking a few minutes. Good luck tonight at the awards banquet. I'm sure it'll be a ton of fun. Thank you. Absolutely, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We are on the ground at the Anita Board Women of Vision Awards in Santa Clara, California. Thanks for watching. ["Women of Vision Awards"]