 Hey everyone, my name is Phil Garrity. I'm a principal group product manager at Microsoft, and I'm happy to be here today to talk about my PM journey. And maybe if for those of you out there who haven't had a traditional PM path, this will resonate with you. I don't know if there is a traditional PM path anymore, but I wanted to spend some time talking about mine. And then if it inspires somebody else, that would be great. So let me go ahead and get started and take you through some things that have happened in my career and some lessons learned along the way. All right, so the first thing I'm gonna do is just kind of talk about this guy, Satya Nadella, who's the CEO of Microsoft. And specifically here, he's talking about Windows 365, which is a product that I currently work on and have been on the team for the last couple of years. We are super excited that we've launched this product back in August. And it's been an incredible journey to be part of this team to build not only that product, but the team itself during the pandemic. And it's, you know, the biggest product that I've ever personally worked on, the most impactful product, the sort of largest addressable market with it. And for many reasons, it's just an extremely exciting product to work on. But I also wanted to, you know, talk about a little bit about what it is, but then also compare it and contrast it with like some of the other things that I've worked on in my career. So in a nutshell, what it is, is we've brought Windows itself, the operating system into the cloud. For the first time, you can log into Windows from any device anywhere in the world. And it's always yours. It's always the way that you left it. It's a personal cloud PC in the cloud. And there's a lot more that I could say about it, but I'll stop there for now and say that building this service was an extraordinary effort. Literally, there are people all over the world working on this at Microsoft. And it's a privilege to be able to work on it. Not all products have as much sort of fanfare with them and the end user experiences that this particular product does. And I've worked on some that weren't like that. In fact, the product that I worked on just for this was called Partner Center. And although Partner Center is a much less well-known product, it is incredibly important to Microsoft. So during Partner Center, I was able to work in a few different areas. I worked there for four years and we built out a set of tools and capabilities for Microsoft's partner channel of almost 50,000 partners to transact with Microsoft for all of the cloud services, including Office, Azure and everything we sell through this portal and a set of APIs and an SDK that backs it up. So my team worked on the analytics that partners are able to see about what's happening with the customers they're serving, their membership in the Microsoft Partner Network itself and the partner account inside of the portal. And what's important is, and to remember like all the details here, it's just that two things, this product and the other product, Windows 365 that I showed you are incredibly different. This product has a much smaller audience. It's a pure B2B type of a product. And in some sense, it has less polish and flair in Windows 365, but it can be just as important in terms of driving revenue and driving business opportunity for your company. And I learned a ton on this product just like I've learned a ton on Windows 365. So many of the things that I've learned on Partner Center, I still carry with me today on Windows 365 and some of the things that I learned along the way didn't translate. And one in particular was that the end user experiences have been quite different for Windows 365. And we just had to adapt the product for a much larger audience. So I wanted to give you a little bit of all of that up front, because that's what I do for work. And it's kind of what has shaped some of the products that I've worked on and the way that I think about the discipline. But this talk is about how to get into product. And so let me back all the way up to the beginning of when I started out as a product manager, actually be even before that. So this is 12 year old Phil working on a PC there on the left that I wanted to put together so that I could play games with my friends. We used to drag these huge desktop PCs around with us when we'd have play dates. And bring it over to my friend's house, throw it in the back of my mom's car along with that CRT monitor. And we'd hook them up and have land parties and play things like TIE Fighter, as you're seeing here. I thought it was the coolest game I'd ever seen. DOS-based game, you install it with a bunch of floppy disks that you're pulling in and out of the machine. But once you get that thing loaded, it's so much fun. And it was well worth all the hours it took to figure out how to build a computer. And I loved it. I loved every aspect of it. I even loved DOS. Lots of people think that's a horrible sort of black screen with the blinking cursor and all that. And I just thought it was beautiful for some reason. I thought it was just fantastic how you could manipulate a computer just by typing a few words in. And I really started a love affair with computers very early on. But something happened. Life intervened and I thought for a minute that I should go to medical school. And I should be something different. I should be in healthcare. And so I went down that path. I was pre-med and I started out my career path thinking that I was gonna go into medicine. But I realized over the course of time that that wasn't the right way for me to go. And so I went from gamer to failed doctor to business. It turns out business has happy to take failed doctors. And I went into consulting. And then I parlayed those skills into a job at Microsoft after I'd kind of realized that consulting has a whole bunch of great skills that you build. But I actually wanted to build things. And I wanted to basically be involved in owning things and driving things forward and having something that I could call my own. So I left consulting and went to take a business job at Microsoft. And this was around 2009. And then I had my first business job at Microsoft and I worked in an area called licensing and pricing, which later became business planning at Microsoft. And there you learn about all of the different skills, how they're packaged and priced and basically monetized for the company. And I worked on Office 365 and I learned specifically about our channels, the way that we sell it through the website and through partners and direct to large enterprise customers through a huge agreement called the enterprise agreement. And what all that taught me was that, well, it was a lot about how enterprises make money. The genius of the enterprise agreement. But I really focused in on the partner side of things. And I got the opportunity to design a new way of selling cloud services to Microsoft's partners, to and through Microsoft's partners as a reseller model, which didn't exist prior to this at Microsoft. And that started kind of my journey into the next opportunity. So the next opportunity that I had was in product. And I was able to start out by building channels, partner channels for Microsoft and eventually move into a product role at Microsoft where I built the partner center experiences that I showed you earlier. And that sort of step-wise progression from business planning into something that was kind of had a business element of it in a program called the Cloud Solution Provider Program at Microsoft, but then also had a platform that underlighted that because I was involved in the design of all that and worked very closely with a bunch of product managers on it, they trusted me, they knew me and they knew that I was somebody willing to take a bet on later on when it was time to build the platform for Cloud Solution Provider Program that we call Partner Center. So all those things were connected, all those experiences I was having were eventually connected. I couldn't see them while I was going through them, but they ended up being connected and they ended up being a really important part of my entry into product. And so I'm spending a little bit more time talking about that since that's what this talk is about, but it just became really apparent to me that being intentional about the steps you're taking toward the career you want is really important. You may not be able to get there in one step, it may make more sense to take multiple steps to get there and leverage your strengths while you're on that journey, lean into them and you'll start to unlock the path. So that's what happened to me and I'll talk a little bit about what I learned in that last phase. So as I was coming into product, I didn't really know what it was. I just thought it was engineering and I was afraid that maybe I was missing something, that maybe that the discipline self was gonna be too much for me, that I was gonna fail at it, that it was only for really smart people in Microsoft and for some reason I wasn't in that group. And so I had a lot of fear going in, but I was also, I felt like, hey, worst case, at least I'll find out that this isn't the right thing for me. I didn't know anything about user experience. I didn't, I mean, I knew things about technology, but I didn't think I knew enough. I knew a lot of smart people at Microsoft who seemed like they knew more than I would ever know about technology. I did know a lot about business though and I did know how to tell stories. I knew how to use data and convince people of things. And so there were skills that I had, I could write and I could speak. There were skills that I had that were very useful in the discipline and were in fact, skills that not everyone that I was working with had. So I began to be able to see that I could really lean on that business acumen while I was learning the other areas. And the first other area I learned was the technical area. The last one was the user experience. And they just began to build on each other and reinforce each other. And while I was absorbing from the people around me, the things that I didn't, that I wasn't as strong in, I was really continuing to lean on that business acumen to help me add value to the people around me and to the business that I was working in. Because all three of these areas are important and you'll find that some people are more strong in one area or another. So search out the people that you can kind of buddy up with and learn from. And also sometimes work with on projects that will compliment your skills. So here's some examples of how many of us at Microsoft think about product. I don't think this is unique to Microsoft. This came from a document that is used internally to talk about what is the role of a product manager in the company. And I've spent enough time outside of the company talking to other PMs to know that these things are pretty common in any product role that you have. And what I've done is I've highlighted in green that things that for me, I was really leaning on that business background to at first to kind of carry me through some of the other things that I was learning about that required the technology background a little bit more. That required some experience in the process of actually going through and building out a product and the user experience elements that we talked about. So the yellow ones on this list, things like prioritization and how you set metrics, developing like a roadmap of the features that you're gonna build in actually going and building them. You know those things took a while for me to pick up on and to figure out how to do. And it's still a work in progress to be honest on all of these things. It's what I love about this discipline. You're never done. You're always just getting better and sharpening your tools. And so today I'm stronger in some of these areas certainly than when I started. And today I lead a team of people that is building skills across all of these areas. But everybody comes in with a different background and did a different skill set. Some people are just blank slate right out of college. They don't have any of these things. And for those who are looking for just the aptitude to be able to take these on. And I'll talk about that in another minute. But as you start to build the skills over time in the discipline, you're looking to build out strength in these areas. Fundamentally, your job as a product manager is to drive growth through the product. Drive growth of your business and your company through the product. So it's your job to understand how do we do that? How do we make sure that we're building the right product with the right vision and strategy or measuring things appropriately that we have a long-term development plan that's being well executed. And then we get it into the market that people buy it, that they understand what it is and that they become fans and evangelists of our product. And then finally, you have to monitor it at the end and you have to know if this is the right product, you've made the right decisions, you have the right features, and if not, you pivot. So that process is universal and it's really important that we in our discipline are strong at all aspects of this. So there's some lessons learned that I wanted to share with all of you for just sort of how I've thought about a product coming into this career and what are some of the things that I've taken away from it? Kind of looking back across the arc of really my life more than even just my career. So the first thing is follow your passions. I can't stress that enough. If I had known that when I was 12, I probably would have gone to get a degree in computer science. I probably would have skipped the whole medicine thing and I might have missed out on some things along the way that actually taught me a lot of other stuff. So I'm not sad that that happened, but in the end, following your passions is what brought me back to the right thing to be focused on, got me into technology. And ironically today, working on Windows 365, I'm building computers again. They just happened to be up in the cloud this time. Leveraging your superpowers is really important as we talked about. You're gonna learn what those are as you progress through your career. In my case, they were communication and they were ability to tell stories and to use data to create compelling arguments. These things allowed me to essentially contribute back to the success of the products and the organization that I was part of and bought me time to learn the other things that I needed to learn to become a stronger product manager and eventually to become a leader that could then help other people on that same journey. Don't take too many steps all at once. So this is important. You don't want to try in, at least in my experience, change lots of things at the same time. That makes job changes just really difficult and it can make the same is true in products as well. You don't wanna change too many features at the same time because you can't tell what it is that you might have done wrong. You know, in your career, if you change employers, disciplines and you go from an individual contributor to a manager all at the same time, I mean, good luck to you if you can do that but for me that's too much change. And so I needed to do it a little bit more of a crawl walk run and it takes longer but that patience pays off because you do develop really strong skills along the way. And that diligence does pay off in the end. Relationships, I can't stress this enough. Getting the job that you're gonna get, the first job you're gonna get requires that somebody bets on you. You've gotta have a relationship for that. You know, as a hiring manager, I might get 400 resumes for a job that we open and we'll interview five or six people. You've got to be in someone's network in order to even get into that interview stage. It's usually somebody who knows you or somebody in your sort of extended network that's kind of getting through those filters and that's just the reality of the world. You know, most industries are like that and most hiring managers make decisions like that. It's how things happen and it's equally true once you get into the organization that the relationships you have will dictate the partnerships that you're building. They'll dictate your own growth and career trajectory. You know, how tightly kind of aligned with your boss you are. So pick the team carefully, pick your partners in your end year and the people you're collaborating with carefully. These relationships are gonna be the key to it all. It's actually not about the technology. It's not about the software. It's not about what we think it's about. It's about the people. If it was just about the other stuff, we'd just get robots to write software. The last thing I wanna talk about is these three things here, curiosity, grit and empathy. I have not figured out a way to teach people this stuff. It is hard to teach this, but it is much easier to teach all of this stuff on the previous slide related to the product journey. So regardless of where you come in in your own professional background, there's a path for you in product. If you're coming in right out of college or with some experience, there's a path for you in product, but you really do need to have these three characteristics. Curiosity is critically important because you've gotta stay interested. So if certain things are uninteresting to you, please don't become a product manager in those things. You've gotta stay focused and be in it for the long haul and that's gonna require that you're willing to also get up off the mat. If you get knocked down, grit means you get back up. Angela Duckworth wrote a great book about this. I encourage you to check it out if you're interested in learning more about it, but grit is resilience when things aren't going the way you want and it's coming back and keeping on it until you get it right. And the last thing is empathy, which is maybe the most important of all of these. It's the ability to understand other people and see things through their eyes to treat them with dignity. And it is incredibly important to do that as a product manager with our customers, with our internal relationships that we have, both with developers and other partner teams you're gonna work with. You're at the center of so many different teams that are relying on you to build the most important asset that the company has in terms of the IP. So you have to have empathy to get this right. So those are my tips, lessons learned. I'm Phil Garrity and I hope that you've enjoyed this talk. I have a wife and two wonderful kids and a lot of this stuff that I do for them and I do for the people that I work with. And I think that the journey that we're all on is the beautiful part of all of this. So I really like my Angelo's quote there. But if you have other questions and you wanna follow up with me, please do on LinkedIn or Twitter. My info is right there. Otherwise I'll just say thank you very much and it's been an honor to speak with you and I hope you have a great rest of your day.