Evolving the OneDrive and SharePoint Team during a Pandemic: Leadership, Rhythm, Capacity, and Inspiration
Photo by Manuel N?geli on Unsplash

Evolving the OneDrive and SharePoint Team during a Pandemic: Leadership, Rhythm, Capacity, and Inspiration

Building software is mostly about people - everything else is ephemeral and temporary as technology is changing all the time. Our computers, our code, our systems are always being upgraded and improved. People and how they work together are the real asset of any technology company. 

This has become more clear to me as I reflect on how our team has adapted and grown through the pandemic together. Separated physically but connecting through Microsoft Teams. Our workspaces are different but our culture, process, and success have continued.

The question I strive to ask is

How can we ensure our team is thriving in this environment and in the future when we start our return to work?

This is an unprecedented opportunity to learn and grow the capability of our team and to come out of this pandemic even stronger!

This is an article on why we decided to make changes to How We Work and what we are learning in doing so. We continue to listen to feedback and iterate our team culture.

How we build our products, how our team feels about the environment in which they do so, directly affects the quality of our work. 

How our team works is important to me. I recently had the opportunity to reflect on What’s my Purpose in this job. I have romantic notions that I’m not easily replaceable and that I provide unique value to my manager and organization. As such, this is what I came up with:

My Purpose at Microsoft is to create the best possible environment for our team and our leaders to work together to identify opportunities and pursue our goals and strategy for our customers. To create delightful products that I care deeply about. To have the space to recharge and inspire me to fulfill my roles as a leader, husband, parent, brother, and son.

As a leader in this amazing organization, I wanted to share our approach and learning in case it’s helpful to others. 

Who am I and what do I do?

First, a little bit of history. I lead the Product Management team (at Microsoft we are called Program Managers for now) for OneDrive and SharePoint. I’ve been at Microsoft for 22 years and grown up as a product leader contributing to products such as Office for Mac, Hotmail, Windows, and Office 365. Our organization (internally called ODSP) was created in 2014 and I’ve been with it since. I consider our team to be one of the most stable I’ve worked in with leaders who have been with it for many years. Each product is supported by what you would call “founders” who still work on them today. It’s truly remarkable that products that are 20-years-old and 13-years-old hold on to wise people who shaped them early in life. Despite having a mature team of leaders, we have hired and welcomed hundreds of new people who have brought excitement and energy with them. Our team is special because of this mix of experiences and perspectives and has underscored the cultural investments of our team that help onboard new team members.

We have grown quite a lot since the founding of ODSP seven years ago and our team expanded to many new geographies. Our team is responsible for numerous products and partners across Microsoft to deliver key collaborative technologies that are part of Microsoft 365 - our consumer, commercial, and education suite that includes Teams, Office, Outlook, Planner, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Windows, Stream, PowerApps, and dozens of more products. 

I co-lead this team with 4 amazing people - Steven Bailey who leads Experience Engineering, Naresh Kanan who leads Core Engineering, Ken Fry who leads our Studio and, our boss and founder of SharePoint, Jeff Teper.

In November of 2020, I was exhausted. I was gearing up to take 4 weeks off work and attempt to recharge for the following year. Many of my colleagues across Microsoft felt similar fatigue. The WorkLab Future of Work “What We’ve Lost … And What We’ve Gained” goes into more detail about these struggles. The pandemic has created a lot of demand for our software and many teams had to hurry up to deliver more and stabilize our cloud service to meet the increased demand. This is a good problem and one that’s a bit hard to feel great about given that the pandemic has created much economic and emotional suffering as well as the tragic loss of many people. In addition, I never felt rested - the normal things I and my family would do to re-charge were gone for now. Our in-person interactions - a huge source of wellbeing for many of us are also gone. We have all been grieving while performing at new levels for our company. Rest was respite.

In our team, we have a fantastic listening system that we use to gather anonymous feedback and measure the health of our teams. The feedback was pretty consistent… in addition to that, we ran several Forms surveys to collect feedback from our Extended Leadership Teams. We also debated ideas in Leadership virtual off-sites and Team meetings on how to address the challenges we faced, and that our managers and teams faced.

Acknowledge, Clarify, Explore, and Solve

A few years ago, I learned a framework for understanding any problem. It’s called ACES and it stands for Acknowledge → Clarify → Explore → Solve. I like this framework because too often we jump right into Explore and Solve without really seeking to acknowledge through listening and asking for clarification so that you can go and solve the right problems. This framework is something I learned about years ago as Microsoft was rolling out the Ten Inclusive Behaviors and I have been using it when faced with difficult and far-reaching problems.

In addition to this framework, Microsoft has a set of Leadership Principles that I love - Create Clarity, Generate Energy and Deliver Success. I always think about these three principles when approaching problems or opportunities in my team.

I’ve found the ACES framework and our Leadership Principles helpful in guiding my approach to taking action to change How our team works. This effort turned into a team project that has enlisted many leaders who report to me and across our organization. We have designed and participated in workshops in January to put together materials and processes that will define what we call “ODSP 2.0". We have concluded these workshops and are now adopting our new way of working.

How we work

My passion is product, but I’ve reached a point in my career where I lead a big enough team and have fantastic product leaders working in that team, that most of my focus is on our team culture, our environment, and our partnerships. In those areas, I include everything about how our team works.

Some people refer to this as process. I think that hugely undersells the role of norms and practices in a team.

I see this work as our strategy for activating people to deliver impact.

Building software is mostly about people - everything else is ephemeral and temporary as technology is changing all the time. Our computers, our code, our systems are always being upgraded and improved. People and how they work together are the real asset of any technology company. 

Consider an orchestra for a second. You have assembled an amazing group of musicians - the best in the world. You have an amazing conductor who motivates, encourages, and leads the musicians to create harmony and rhythm for the music. 

To take the orchestra to great heights one of the fundamental things you need is an approach to organizing the musicians to practice and learn how to play as a team, a series of venues to play and prepare in and you need to perform well to satisfy the expectations of your customers. Of course, you need world-class musicians who can play the right instruments for the music.

A team of product managers, designers, engineers is no different. 

You need a Leadership Team to establish the mission, goals, and strategy for the Team, hire retain and grow the talent and be accountable for achieving the right Results.

You need a Rhythm of the Business (ROB) to create a system of engaging leadership with the team to deliver the work and satisfy the business and customer goals.

You need a great team who can do the work aligned to some schedule - this determines your Capacity.

You need Inspiration to draw in ideas and innovation that excites the team and customers and helps you craft a differentiated strategy.

Assuming you all agree, let’s talk about how these things changed or were impacted by the pandemic.

Feedback from our Leaders

An important part of any change is understanding why you feel the need to make changes. We have many listening tools at Microsoft, and we look at the anonymous data and follow-up with drill in surveys and questions to acknowledge and clarify the feedback (ACES framework, first acknowledge then clarify).

For my team, one of the tools we use to measure team happiness is called TINYPulse. Every month the team is asked to rate their happiness on a scale of 1-5. Over the course of the pandemic, I noted a worrisome trend. Understandably my leadership team and I were asked “What are you doing about this”?

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We also focused on surveying our Extended Leadership Team (XLT) - this is the most senior members of ODSP that report to the 4 leaders (myself, Steve, Ken and Naresh) or into our global team leaders. It’s a few dozen people and together they lead everyone in ODSP across the globe.

The first two questions we asked were:

1) How would you gauge your work/life balance and overall sense of mental health BEFORE the COVID-19 pandemic and work from home? Consider things such as meetings, focus time, personal time, family time, are we doing too much, covid situation, work-from-home 

2) How would you gauge your work/life balance and overall sense of mental health AFTER the COVID-19 pandemic and work from home? Consider things such as meetings, focus time, personal time, family time, are we doing too much, covid situation, work-from-home.

Here is a summary of the entire survey:

Rhythm of business - We often have non-essential meetings with unclear outcomes that take employees out of the flow of their work.

Work practices - Our current work practices and the amount of work taken on by our team during the pandemic contribute to feelings of stress, exhaustion, and frustration. And this is aggravated by the fact that we are working across multiple time zones which only increases the amount of work. 

Interpersonal interactions - Interpersonal interactions have suffered, and the team is less energetic because they can’t interact in person. 

Adapting to the pandemic - The changing business climate and demand for our products have created more intense working conditions. Managers have been effective at bringing their teams closer together despite the challenges of working remotely from one another, but this work takes an emotional toll on our people.

Work/life balance - Many people struggle with the ability to separate work from life.  Others appreciate that the freedom and flexibility to balance work and life contribute to more intentional approaches to work. 

Based on these survey results we felt informed that we Acknowledged and Clarified the feedback and were well prepared to take the next steps and Explore and Solve these problems.

Our first wave of solutions – managing capacity better

We implemented a few changes in the summer of 2020 to relieve some pressure. Our team was very much still in crisis management mode but we were also trying to transition to a more stable pace. In hindsight, we did not achieve this but we did make some progress.

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1) Protect Lunch

Early in the pandemic lunch was used to cram more meetings in. This added to the already difficult environment many people in our team faced with children in the home. Without a cafeteria steps from our building, lunch turned into something that needed more time and planning. 

One of the first changes we made was to ask that our managers and leaders avoid scheduling meetings during lunch. That time was considered “protected” so that our team members could make meals for themselves and their children and also have some time to catch up and breathe.

2) Adjusting meetings

One of the first things most people realized was the fatigue of going from meeting to meeting without any transitions or breaks. When we were on campus, every meeting had a natural break – it usually involved walking somewhere else, possibly grabbing a drink or a snack, or visiting the restroom. People would often check in on their email or Teams chats as well, or even send a personal message or two via SMS.

The changes we made here were to snap to 25-minute meetings instead of 30-minute meetings and 45-minute meetings instead of 60-minute meetings. 

This change was made easier by the new features in Outlook that let you establish these blocks as the new meetings blocks for scheduling meetings.

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3) No Meeting Fridays

The most controversial changes we contemplated were making a whole day of the week a “no meeting day”. There was a lot of debate about this from our leaders. Some questioned the ability of our employees to “work” during this day vs extending the weekend to three days. Some preferred a different day of the week. Some expressed skepticism that this was going to solve anything vs compress the already tough Monday – Thursday. Some pointed out that this would not align with time zones for our teams around the world. 

Initially, we decided to make this “recommended” for a few weeks, and then we would survey and revisit this approach. Our Leadership team decided to model this by canceling all our Friday meetings.

Most members of our team loved No Meeting Fridays. 95% of surveyed team members supported formalizing this approach. The feedback on no meeting Friday indicated that one of the frustrations was that many of our partner teams did not have such policies and some of our PMs that work with customers could not avoid meetings successfully. With that feedback, we decided to formalize the policy and also update it to be permission-based and empower people to say no.

We created the following statement from the leadership team to enable people to make good choices regarding their Fridays:

You are welcome to link to this policy if you need to refer to it or share it with someone else at Microsoft. You have the support of your leadership team in ensuring you have the flexibility to create the necessary space to complete your work and projects.

During the COVID-19 Pandemic and until we are back to Stage 6, members of ODSP (that report to Ken, Omar, Steve, Naresh) have permission to mark their Fridays free of meetings. The ODSP LT will not be scheduling meetings on Friday unless there are exceptional circumstances. This policy is designed to support the well-being and health of our employees.

No Meeting Friday is not a "no workday" or "holiday." If the best thing for you is to take time off from work each week for a few hours or a day, please consult your benefits and manager to arrange this.

We will revisit this policy when we are back to Stage 6, listen to your feedback, and decide if we want to continue.

My belief is that we will keep No Meeting Friday’s when we are back at work. I see more upside and benefit to having this approach. 

Our second wave of solutions – Redefining our Rhythm of the Business - ODSP 2.0

As we barreled towards the end of 2020, we decided to focus on really adapting our Rhythm and Capacity more formally and more substantially. Our guiding principles focus on:

  • Thriving during and after a Pandemic – adapting to our new reality
  • Rhythm - Approaching our work with passion, intensity and care
  • Capacity - Calendar, meetings, projects, home life – new reality
  • Inspiration - Planning, culture, innovation, growth

We framed the goals for the team and welcomed feedback. We identified the following tracks and leaders to create workshops during the first three weeks in January. The end result can be summarized by this info graphic:

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These areas were:

Monthly Business Review 2.0

  1. Where appropriate - use industry best-practices for how we measure & plan investments areas around inorganic growth
  2. Provide greater focus/clarity around return on investments of investments on inorganic growth metrics (incl. user adoption & revenue growth)
  3. Enable meaningful tracking of ODSP investment areas at all stages of maturity
  4. Intentionally classify business areas based on maturity, and allocate MBR time accordingly

Meetings 2.0

The goal for Meetings 2.0 was to focus on

  1. Purposeful Meetings - Purposeful meetings avoid reading slides to the audience but proactively seek to engage attendees to participate.
  2. Efficient Meetings - Efficient meetings are healthy meetings. They include space between meetings, and they generate energy rather than suck the energy out of the day.
  3. Inclusive Meetings - Remote and hybrid meetings provide unique challenges to ensure all voices are heard and that meeting attendees are fully invested in the meeting. Inclusive meetings make better decisions because people are paying attention and actively engaged in the outcomes of the meeting.

We created a website and set of resources for Meetings 2.0.

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The website is built using SharePoint communications sites powered by our VR experience Spaces. There is a starter kit and also examples for people to follow.

An overview of the meetings 2.0 starter kit
A launch checklist for a meeting

It's amazing how a meeting can go from a drag to success if you follow the simple steps to making it purposeful, inclusive, and efficient.

Progress Reports

Progress reports are an important tool for communications and celebrating learning and success. In our team, we share progress reports on our SharePoint site where everyone in the team can read them. We don’t use email for progress reports as that makes it hard for new team members to read older progress reports. By writing them on our SharePoint site people can link to them, search for them, and re-use the content.

The goal is:

  1. Making them real
  2. Making them easy, even automating where we can
  3. Making them replace unnecessary meetings
  4. A new basis for potential innovation/ideation process

Progress reports should include

  • Progress against OKRs  
  • Last period's activities - This is key to the report as it is where you break down how you have been spending your time. This is most likely the main thing your direct stakeholders are looking to understand.  Be sure to call out teams collaborating with you. 
  • Achievements - This section can be great for drawing attention to the one or two most significant wins for the period. However, if you find yourself repeating the 'last period's activities', then leave it out and celebrate in the activities section. 
  • Next period's activities - Cover the main things you intend to work on in the next period and the expected outcomes from those activities.  This lets your next status report tracks progress against the expectations and reflect on that progress. 
  • Issues and escalations - Cover anything that is halting your progress here or things that you need assistance in resolving. 

Summarizing How We Work 2.0

There is a lot more to how we run our team. As part of ODSP 2.0, we made changes to our team planning, engineering checkpoints, and weekly leadership hot issues and delivery reviews. We operate on a semester cadence (twice a year) for org wide planning and checkpoints and below is a summary of our engagements:

  1. Semester Planning – team-wide planning to support our work for six months and generate new ideas and innovation. Planning often involves working with a dozen teams across Microsoft with workshops and report-outs for leadership. One of our workshops takes place in the Microsoft Development Center in Olso, Norway each winter - it's an amazing place and team that delivers our Microsoft Search and People experiences.
  2. Annual Vision Day - each January we have a big event and product fair to generate energy and celebrate progress, team members, goals, product, and technical plans, and culture. The product fair is a place for our team and partners to learn about our work across 50 different booths.
  3. Semester Checkpoints - Every six months we review progress against commitments and plans for the next six months.
  4. Spring Event – Each spring we have customer events where we polish our messaging and product delivery. Examples include Build, Microsoft Ignite, SharePoint Conference.
  5. Fiscal year OKRs and Goals – we align our goal setting to the fiscal calendar and our parent organization – Experiences + Devices.
  6. Summer All Hands – Similar to Vision day but focused on celebrating progress, doing demos, and generating energy for the remainder of the year.
  7. Fall Event - Each fall we have customer events where we polish our messaging and product delivery with Microsoft Ignite being the biggest followed by the European SharePoint Conference.

We are ready for 3.0

2020 was the most challenging year that I ever faced as a leader. I've learned a lot in this effort and these learnings helped create an environment that we can evolve together so that each person in our team will thrive. With a transition back to the office this year there is no doubt we'll start working on 3.0 once we gain a truly hybrid experience. We're ready to move forward together.

Marty Steinberg

Retired. ex-GoDaddy, ex-Microsoft.

3 年

What a great article, Omar. Thanks for laying out the roadmap to inspire others with similar challenges.

回复

Great post Omar Shahine. ACES is basically a design thinking process. Empathize. Define the problem. Ideate possible solutions. Select one. Build. Iterate. Thanks for sharing this journey.

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Christine Green

Digital Workplace | SharePoint Online | Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Teams | Intranet

3 年

Great post. Is the Meetings 2.0 starter kit available outside of Microsoft?

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Thank you Omar Shahine for the great article and Jeff Teper for sharing this at Ignite earlier today. As a fellow PM in a partner team I can see how these will help my team and broader org as I adopt and adapt these concepts.

Andrew Sumitani

RIA Growth & Recruiting Software | COO at Poseidon | 2x Exits | VP of Marketing & Coach

3 年

This post is a masterclass in how to add value. Especially this idea of Meetings 2.0. We have to think about these differently because we interact differently now. Omar Shahine I'm waiting for your book on using data to become a better leader!

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