Grad Journey towards PM

Introducing a series of snapshots from the life of a graduate student during his PM job search here in the United States. One of the main goals of this series is to assist aspiring PM students in learning how to act in different situations.

Background:

Sam is a graduate student from a top-tier university looking for a breakthrough in Product Management. He gazes around the career fair only to be lost amongst tons of companies and finally stumbles upon a far-fetched Microsoft company board with open Program Manager positions. He wants to learn more about the process and ultimately builds the courage to talk to the Microsoft personnel, Paul.

Let's sneak into their chat during the SPRING 2019 career fair.

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Sam: Hi! I am Sam. I am currently pursuing my master's in MIS and just saw a banner with the Program Management role at MSFT that I am highly interested in. I would like to know more about the same from you.

Paul: Awesome! Nice meeting you Sam.

I am Paul, a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft. As a PM at PowerPoint, I own a set of end-to-end workflows for the new Office mobile apps on Android and iOS platforms. To deliver these user experiences I am responsible for a set of micro-services that have a comprehensive telemetry pipeline. We see tens of millions of customers use our services each day which allows us to make data-driven product decisions. We are using data to continuously iterate in order to improve user retention and drive growth.

As a PM, I am also constantly analyzing the competitive landscape, talking with customers, and learning new paradigms to guide future investment. I run our MVP program which is a set of hand-curated PowerPoint experts who I engage with throughout the year to gather feedback on our in-market products.

Sam: Sounds interesting to me. I have used MS-PowerPoint since my childhood right from making my first About Myself presentation when I was 8 to recently presenting the forecast results to my manager and recommending solutions at work, this is one the best Microsoft products I have used. It's quick & easy to use, present, modify, and reorder presentation slides. But to be frank, I feel PowerPoint can still be improved and has a long way to go

Paul: I really appreciate your feedback. I would love to know why you feel that PowerPoint needs improvement?

Sam: Recently, one of my team partners and I presented our work-related analysis to our managers. I used PPT while my colleague used Prezi.

I was curious to understand the product. Hence, I looked through the product and used it. I found it super flexible, aesthetically appealing with better animations, and easy to use with tons of dynamic templates. New software like Prezi can capture the audience in a much better way, even though it's not easy to use. I really like the gamification feature of Prezi a lot, which makes it quite engaging to the audience. 

Paul: Great answer. I’ll take a note of that. If you were to improve one feature of PowerPoint, what would it be? And why?

Sam: The PowerPoint software lacks the transition effects available in software like Prezi. PowerPoint can sometimes be difficult for older computers (old computers are inevitable in many office environments), especially when working with transition animations. I wish if I could link slides to slides like I can in Prezi. If Prezi and PowerPoint combined, that would be amazing!

Paul: This is a great recommendation. I would like to share this with my team and discuss more on that. It was a pleasure talking to you. 

Sam: Thank you for your time, Paul. I really appreciate your explanation for the subtle nuances of the PM role at Microsoft.

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Takeaway:

This is how Sam steered the conversation confidently in front of the Microsoft employee. Days later, he gets a call to present his insightful ideas to the Microsoft PowerPoint team at their Redmond office. Shortly, he secures his dream PM internship with Microsoft too.

Sam was passionate about Microsoft products. Be like Sam.