The MSF Team Model and Product Management

Product management practices explained by the MSF Team?Model

Introduction

The Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) is a “deliberate and disciplined approach” to delivering technology products. It comprises several models and concepts.

This review focuses on the MSF Team Model and leverages it to explain general product management practices and principles of the Blackblot PMTK? Methodology.

Micro-Soft in the?Begining

Micro-Soft (later Microsoft) was founded in 1975 by Paul Allen and Bill Gates in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and relocated to Bellevue, Washington, in 1979.

Early on, Microsoft sold BASIC programming language interpreters for the Altair 8800 personal computer.

Above is the iconic photo from 1978 of the first eleven employees at Microsoft.

This photo includes Microsoft founders Bill Gates (bottom left) and Paul Allen (bottom right).

In 1981, Microsoft licensed a clone of the CP/M operating system, which it named MS?DOS, to IBM for its newly introduced personal computer, the IBM?PC.

Microsoft became immensely successful as a result of the IBM and similar licensing agreements.

Informal and Growing?Fast

Microsoft grew rapidly during the 1980s.

However, despite the accelerated growth, the centralized management structure and culture where Bill Gates was the CEO, Chief Programmer and a host of other strategic, tactical and technical key roles was preserved.

Management was centralized to a point where Bill Gates was also the Chief Interviewer at Microsoft and interviewed every new Microsoft job candidate, whether for a secretary or vice president role.

During the 1980s, Microsoft’s internal processes remained unchanged, and the culture was of a small and informal startup, although Microsoft now had 3,000 employees and new and more complex product lines.

Microsoft gradually morphed into an inefficient company, and operations were beginning to seem chaotic and uncontrolled.

During the 1980s, Microsoft introduced several new products, including Windows 1.0 (1985), Windows 286 and Windows 386 (1988), which were buggy and problematic.

The launch of some Microsoft products was delayed by six months and even a year and a half.

Microsoft executives were growing worried about the legal and commercial repercussions that could result from increasingly faulty products being shipped increasingly late.

Microsoft’s informal and unstructured internal culture was considered the culprit for the company’s problems, and Bill Gates sought to find a solution.

Mike Maples from?IBM

IBM was considered the most formal and organized technology company at the time, so in 1988, Bill Gates recruited a twenty-year IBM veteran named Mike Maples to help fix Microsoft’s processes.

Although his title at IBM was Director of Software Strategy, Mapels’ job description at IBM shows that he was primarily responsible for product management and project management.

Bill Gates tasked Mike Maples to fix Microsoft’s product delivery and development processes.

Mike Maples studied Microsoft for the entire year of 1988.

In March 1989, Maples and other Microsoft managers attended a four?day off?site retreat, during which they deliberated Microsoft’s processes and problems.

At the end of the off?site retreat, Chris Mason, a development manager in the MS Word group, wrote a summary memo titled Zero?defects Code that encapsulated the understandings achieved during the meetings.

Zero?defects Code?Memo

The Zero?defects Code is a brilliant memo that became a pivotal turning point in Microsoft’s history and reshaped Microsoft’s internal processes.

A transcript of the Zero?defects Code memo can be found in Michael Cusumano’s book Microsoft Secrets: How the World’s Most Powerful Software Company Creates Technology, Shapes Markets and Manages People.

Three notable highlights in the Zero?defects Code memo were instrumental and influential in designing the Blackblot PMTK? Methodology:

1) Flawed processes are the?culprit

Flawed processes cause failure, not people. Repeatedly blaming and replacing people is pointless and indicative of flawed and ineffectual processes.

2) Doing the minimum is not?enough

People and companies cannot succeed when they gravitate to their comfort zones. Performing the minimum on crucial tasks is insufficient to compete in modern markets.

3) End?to?end understanding

There must be a complete and detailed understanding of where processes begin and end at the company, department, team, and individual levels.

The Blackblot PMTK? Methodology’s design to be holistic, consistent, and practical was influenced by these three ideals taken from Microsoft’s Zero-defects Code?memo.

Creation of?MSF

The understandings and conclusions outlined in the 1989 Microsoft Zero?defects Code memo prompted Microsoft to review and fix its internal development processes.

A prolonged internal effort at Microsoft to improve the way software products are delivered to the market culminated with the introduction of the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) in 1993.

MSF is a set of principles, models, disciplines, concepts, best practices and guidelines for delivering technology products.

One of MSF’s models is the MSF Team Model, which describes Microsoft’s approach to structuring teams and their activities to enable product delivery success.

The MSF Team Model defines roles, functional areas, and responsibilities that help team members reach their respective goals in the product delivery program.

Different roles, goals and responsibilities are assigned to each of the other role clusters.

The MSF Team Model role clusters comprise six functions: Program Management, Product Development, Quality Assurance (aka Test), Release Management, User Experience, and Product Management.

The MSF Team Model is not a hierarchical structure. Instead, it’s a mapping of different functions that work in unison and in a synchronized manner to bring a product to market.

The Program Manager leads the product delivery program, not the product manager.?

For more information, see the “Program Manager is the Product CEO” chapter, pages 155–158, in the Blackblot PMTK Book: Second Edition.

MSF Concepts

The principles and thinking patterns in MSF emphasize communication, collaboration, adaptability, and, notably, Team Empowerment.

Empowerment is a psychological concept from the 1960s that describes giving people more control, autonomy, self-determination, and accountability over themselves and their lives.

Empowerment experiments at Volvo and General Mills during the 1970s demonstrated that decentralized decision-making could positively affect productivity.

In the business context, Individual Empowerment and Team Empowerment gained visibility during the 1990s. See the Empowered Teams 1st Edition book (1993).

The Individual Empowerment and Team Empowerment concepts are an intrinsic part of MSF and Blackblot PMTK? Methodology.

Furthermore, MSF was designed to be agnostic to heavyweight or lightweight software development practices and does not force a certain development or project management method.

Similarly, the Blackblot PMTK? Methodology was designed using universal principles of product management applicable to all types of products.

MSF Team Model and Product Management

Product management is closely guarded and remains autonomous at companies with mature and strategic thinking at the executive leadership level.

At these companies, thoughtful consideration of the importance of pure product management is prevalent.

At other companies, politics, budget constraints, entrenched traditions, and a dominant engineering function will distort product management beyond recognition.

The MSF Team Model can be used to schematically illustrate how responsibilities that belong to other departments are incorrectly assigned to product management.

Product Management + Program Management

Assigning the product manager with program management responsibilities results in the CEO of the Product, Product CEO, or Mini-CEO designations.

The CEO of the Product moniker originated from the 1980s-1990s Generalization approach to product management in Silicon Valley, which views the product manager as responsible for everything related to the product and doing anything related to it.

Project management is a skill related to program management, not product management.

Subsequently, at the core of the Product Management + Program Management combination are project management activities.

The challenge of leading without authority, which is really a dominant trait of program management, is often discussed in the context of this combination.

Product Management + Product Development

The ascent of Agile and Scrum in the early 2,000s allowed product management to get drawn into product development.

Pulling the product manager into the product development sphere is a distinctive characteristic of the Technology approach to product management whereby the product manager is assigned product development responsibilities that belong deep in the solution space.

Now, the product manager is an extension and a resource to product development and subservient to the software or product development method.

Product Management + Anything?Goes

Devoid of any methodological foundation or principles other than “Anything Goes,” the product manager is assigned any responsibility or task directly or remotely associated with the product, except for selling or actual engineering work.

For example, the product manager may be assigned user experience or product design responsibilities, release management ownership, product testing schedules, or all of them.

Product Management + Strategic Thinking

When left to its own devices and responsible only for product management, the product management function becomes strategic, market-driven and problem-space-oriented.

This scenario is the Methodology approach to product management, whereby product management activities are governed by foundation rules and clear concepts, not unsupported opinions and conjectures.

Market?driven product management happens where there is autonomy, and subsequently, the Blackblot PMTK? Methodology is a market-driven product management methodology.

Summary

The Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) emerged at the right time for Microsoft and for other companies that had adopted MSF.

The MSF Team Model views product management as an autonomous function responsible for gathering insights into market needs and user requirements.?

The MSF Team Model was instrumental in developing the Blackblot PMTK? Methodology and its Product Management Team and Product Definition Team models.

This review focused on the MSF Team Model and leveraged it to explain general product management practices and principles of the Blackblot PMTK? Methodology.

Learn More…

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• Take a Blackblot Strategic Product Management? Training Course

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