Like many customers, I don’t like it when businesses say “No” to me, but I recently found myself on the giving end of that “No”. It was a new experience for me. As you may know from my blog, one of the products I own at Microsoft is an internal wiki platform for enterprise documentation….
Author: Ellery
Setting up your own VPN server with OpenVPN in Azure
I recently learned how to set up my own VPN server, and in this article I share those learnings. The server I set up is an OpenVPN Access Server. All the resources are provisioned from Microsoft Azure’s Portal UI. I chose Azure to host these resources because it is the cloud platform I am most…
Final thoughts on enterprise documentation
(Note: When I wrote this article I thought I was going to stop working on enterprise documentation to work on Inner Source. — Turned out, I’ve been given the opportunity to work on both!) In this article, I share some of my thoughts about enterprise documentation to wrap up my experience as a documentation PM…
A complement to Wiki Talk Pages in enterprise Wikis
As a documentation PM, I recently took some spare time to inspect the Talk Pages feature in the MediaWiki software. As an enterprise documentation PM, I concluded that Talk Pages has its limits when MediaWiki software is used in enterprise settings (instead of public settings, for example, Wikipedia). So, I came up with a feature…
Embracing ambiguity as a PM
I must admit that the idea of embracing ambiguity didn’t come naturally for me at first: after all, as a computer science graduate I was trained to think binary — zero or one, yes or no, right or wrong. But when evaluating products as a PM, there is usually a spectrum of shades of gray…
The one thing I learned about storytelling
It’s been exactly one year since I became a full-time PM with Microsoft. Among the plethora of things I’ve learned about products, one of the most resonating piece is about storytelling: A good story must make sense to the audience. This is harder than it sounds. The first corollary of this is that you must take…
In-person customer interviews: 3 things I learned
This past week, I unlocked an important PM achievement: interviewing customers face-to-face. In fact, after 12 customer interviews in 4 days, I found it both exciting and challenging, especially for someone who hasn’t done it before. (I had had customer interviews before, but only over Skype.) Thanks to the unexpected challenges posed by these in-person…
A technique to validate customer problem statements: whiteboarding
I would like to share a new technique useful for PM’s I learned in the past week: how to use a whiteboard to validate a customer problem statement. Part 1: The whiteboarding technique The whiteboarding technique I learned is quite simple to describe: you write your problem statement on a whiteboard, and really put each…
We won 3rd place at MSVan Sumobot competition!
Check out our bot! It’s not the fanciest but it held up against many strong opponents!
The ubiquitous storytelling
Storytelling is everywhere! If you saw the title and opened this article, chances are you’ve been trained to accept the importance of storytelling like Newton’s Laws to physics. 100% onboard with this acknowledgement, I want to spotlight the presence of the storytelling technique in a few very different areas that I’ve been exploring. 0. A…
3 months in. A long way to go.
Remember, remember, the 4th of December… Three months ago, on December 4th, I joined Microsoft as a full-time employee. Based in Vancouver, BC, I work as a program manager on the Engineering System team. Before I started my job, I had a million ideas rolling around in my mind about what life would be like…
Tips for working under jet lag
Recently coming out of the worst jet lag I’ve ever experienced — and to top that off, starting on a new job with a big jet lag — I can safely say that memory is one I never would want again: feeling tired exactly nine to five, then not being able to fall asleep at…