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Ellery Yang

I write about products and the PM role.

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Banner image, where the title reads "Say no with empathy"

Saying “No” to customers, with empathy

Posted on October 6, 2019April 25, 2020 by Ellery

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….

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Setting up your own VPN server with OpenVPN in Azure

Posted on July 10, 2019November 13, 2020 by Ellery

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…

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Final thoughts on enterprise documentation

Posted on June 12, 2019April 25, 2020 by Ellery

(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…

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A complement to Wiki Talk Pages in enterprise Wikis

Posted on April 20, 2019April 25, 2020 by Ellery

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…

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Embracing ambiguity as a PM

Posted on March 17, 2019April 25, 2020 by Ellery

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…

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The one thing I learned about storytelling

Posted on December 2, 2018April 25, 2020 by Ellery

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…

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In-person customer interviews: 3 things I learned

Posted on October 28, 2018April 25, 2020 by Ellery

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…

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