My New Job
About five years ago, I switched from field consulting at Microsoft to a job in the product groups. I loved working in the field, but wanted to
shift to the PM role for awhile. In part, this was because my wife and I were about to have a baby, and one of us had to switch to a job with
absolutely no travel for a year or two. And in part, I wanted to get a “ship-it” under my belt, to prove that I could do it.
Five years have passed, I’ve gotten 3 ship-its (and 3 more pending), and I’ve worked for some great teams and a few good bosses I can heartily
recommend to my friends. I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to be a good PM. But I’ve continued to keep up with my friends in consulting,
sales, and evangelism, and always thought about one day returning (as I’ve blogged about here a couple of times).
So after my wife switched to a role in the product groups and a number of people nagged me about “why aren’t you an evangelist?” (and not just
because I’m preachy and my favorite movie is “The Apostle”), the timing felt right. I’m closing my first month as a “Technical Evangelist”, and I
couldn’t be happier. I’m part of the “Developer and Platform Evangelism” team, who help drive adoption of our
unreleased products. The team is jam-packed with people who I linked from this blog in the early years, and all seem to have gravitated to the same org. I did my first channel 9 video with Scoble just last week. I’m the guy responsible for evangelizing IE7, a rather unique product in many ways.
But rather than use this post to discuss the particulars of IE7 evangelism (deserving of several posts later on), I want to discuss the role of
evangelism, and more generally “why evangelists are happier”. I’ve known this fact for a long time (so you needn’t read any “selection bias” into my statement), but as a fresh PM in the product groups, this was one of my biggest
surprises. I recall sitting through my first “MS Employee Survey” meeting for the organization, where the (then) VP was going through the various
numbers on employee job satisfaction and morale. The numbers are sort of a competition between business units — SQL vs. Windows, MSN vs. Windows,
and so on. But none of the R&D groups bother comparing themselves against sales, consulting, evangelism, or similar roles. The VP at the time
explained to us, “sales groups always have higher numbers, for various reasons”, and left it at that. Things change, and these are just a numbers,
but I am confident this generalization still holds true — people in sales-oriented roles are happier. There are probably a couple of reasons for
this phenomenon:
- Happier people sell better. People who are more positive and optimistic tend to be in higher demand in customer-facing roles, and thus these
roles are a filter for the kind of people who are happier.
- Tighter feedback loop. Product groups are often on multi-year ship cycles, so an employee can go through several reviews without ever seeing his product in customers’ hands. In addition, multi-year projects are more likely to slip and/or have significant course corrections, and I have seen survey data that suggests that slipped schedules and feature cuts are the number one issue affecting morale. There are some great teams in the company who have short ship cycles, and although it tends to be very intense, I think the data show that these teams are happier.
- Good managers. There are great managers in the product groups, to be fair, but about half of them are from the field and sales anyway. My litmus test for a good manager is “how well does the manager cultivate and grow the bench, so that the organization has lots of healthy managers even after he or she leaves?” Before he was CEO, Steve Ballmer used to be responsible for sales and field organizations, and his impact extended down to virtually every line employee in
the organization. Even though he’s not as involved today, the managers there today came up under his influence, and the whole organization bears his
imprint in a way that the product groups don’t (yet). For people who worked in the sales and field orgs in those days, there is no question why
Steve “I’m your monkey boy” Ballmer inspires so much loyalty. Now, I don’t want to seem like a suckup, so I’ll bring up a more concrete example:
Bob McDowell. Bob basically created the MCS organization, so he set the template for all of the managers who followed. Bob left, then came back, then left again, and left again several years ago. Ask anyone in MCS to point out the managers who came up under Bob McDowell or bear his influence, and they’ll point out the managers who have the strongest and happiest orgs.
In any case, this isn’t to say that the product groups are not a happy place. Life in the product groups at Microsoft is better than just about any other place I’ve worked, and I’ve worked a few places. This is one of the best places in the world to work, and people in the product groups should realize how fortunate they already are before mobbing evangelism with resumes 
Now that I don’t have to pretend not to be a shill anymore (it’s my title, now, after all), you can expect me to say it the way I see it.