How a Principal Product Manager Turned a 'Unachievable' Goal into a SpaceX Partnership

Yeah Yeah, um, so, uh, when I was part of the Azure strategy team, um, obviously my work was very, like, you know, project driven, but also I owned the articulation of the state of the business and what our go forward, go to market strategy is. Um, as you know, Microsoft is very, very, it's an enterprise focused company, and, uh, it is a really hard sell to get them to focus on anything that's not a large enterprise. Um, however, on multiple projects, I noticed that. Uh, in certain areas, especially with Azure like IoT and AI, uh, it is the smaller companies that are hidden champions. It's the small and medium business segment, uh, that is the hidden champion. Uh, that are the hidden champions, but, uh, it was a tough sell, um, and I, and I'll actually be very transparent about, like, one instance where it did not work well, what I learned from it, and then how I was able to convince, uh, my team to partner with, uh, SpaceX, and you may have seen the announcement a few months back. Uh, we did, uh, Azure does have a, a partnership with SpaceX now, and, and I can walk you through, uh, the process, the journey of how that happened over multiple years. Um. So, one of the projects that I worked on when I, when I first joined the team was what should our Azure strategy for China be? And, uh, the leadership already knew, uh, in their mind that they wanted to, uh, are you checking if we're good on time?

OK, no worries. Um, so, uh, one of the first projects that I worked on was what should our China strategy be? Um, and, uh, as part of that, I came up with three segments. There's the, uh, strategic 500 or Fortune 500 companies, uh, worldwide companies, global companies that are looking to enter China. Then there are these Chinese multinationals that are looking to expand out of China, and then there are, you know, uh, Chinese local companies. That are like very quick to adapt to new technology and uh when I looked at these three segments, um, I, like I would have expected most of the revenue to come from uh the strategic 500 segment because that is where, like, Microsoft's strength lies. But actually, the biggest, the largest revenue that we had was from these local Chinese companies, um, and And that is something that made me want to, like, you know, push for, um, uh, giving more attention and focus to small and medium companies. Uh, so when, when I pitched this to my, uh, CVP, uh, at the time, uh, she was like, no, uh, we're not, like, you know, we have a set strategy for China, and this was, this was when the trade war had begun as well, and, uh, she was like, we, we want to invest in China, but not, uh, make very risky investments. And also, Microsoft, unlike my previous companies, I would say it's more risk averse than, uh, like Goldman Sachs or like back when I was in consulting. Um, and, and, and I will admit, so, that was like the company's risk profile was something that, um, I, uh, I, I probably discounted a little when I made this, uh, recommendation. Uh, so that recommendation did not go through, but, uh, when my next project came through, which was to do a deep dive industry analysis, um, and, uh, uh, like, you know, the, uh, uh, make recommendations on the key scenarios that we should go after, as well as key custom marquee customers and marquee partners that we should go after, uh, when I looked at the discrete manufacturing industry, again, came, came up to a similar, uh, uh, finding that. Uh, it's the small and medium companies that are the hidden champions and early adopters of IOT and, uh, AI. Large companies do want to, but, like, you know, they can't migrate their large manufacturing execution systems so quickly, right? Uh, and so, um, the, the, the, what, so SMB companies, especially in countries like China and Germany and Taiwan, uh, those were the hidden champions. But having learned from my past experience and our risk appetite to be able to directly go towards, uh, SMB companies, I was like, OK, why not look for something in between? OK, so, when it comes to discrete manufacturing, the key scenarios that we were already targeting were the traditional IOT scenarios. But the key opportunity that, that, that would have been a great opportunity for Azure from a cloud computing standpoint, but we had not yet targeted was product simulation. And so, uh, and when you think of product simulation, uh, companies, Companies like SpaceX and there's another company like Planet Labs, uh, and, and, and many others, right, that come to mind. And so, even if we did not have the appetite to go after small unknown, small and medium, uh, businesses, uh, at least, uh, partnering with a company like SpaceX. Something that I was able to uh make a recommendation for which got accepted. It, like I said, it took like this process took like a year or so. Uh, it started with like a hard no for anything that was not an enterprise company and it went to at least, uh, uh, something like as awesome as SpaceX and being able to partner with them.

Um, going outside of, uh, strategic 500 companies, because if you look at any, uh, any of our business decks, you will see that our sales strategy is to go after the strategic 500 because we think that is where Microsoft sells and, uh, making a recommendation that was beyond that, which would actually get implemented. Something that based on my personal experience with the China project, uh, I did not think that it was achievable, but because I gave a bridge between, uh, the really small companies, uh, and enterprises, um, it, it did end up being, uh, something that was achievable.

Yeah. So, um, Research shows that, uh, like we, we have focused on enterprise companies for, uh, for a long time, right, and our premise, like Microsoft's premise is that we have all these legacy like uh so many customers that have like over 70 60% of their workload still on legacy infrastructure, like on-prem infrastructure and just migrating that. To, uh, to the cloud itself is a big opportunity. So let's focus on that first. But history has shown that that's not happening fast enough in enterprise companies, and enterprise companies are going to be slow to adapt, and it is OK. Like the repercussions of not moving to like quickly adapting to IoT and AI for a large company, uh, is not. As much as it is for a small company and also the motivation for small companies that are cloud like that are born in the cloud, um, and that have the needs of like the revenue itself, the, the core competency of the company is coming from these core technologies. Those are the companies that are going to bring us revenue in the next 3 to 5 years. It's not these, uh, just focusing on large enterprises. And so I did an analysis, uh, which showed how much time it, it, it, it is, it has taken us to get revenue from, uh, from large enterprises and the pace at which we are adding, uh, new projects within our enterprises because unlike M365, it's not an org-wide decision, right? It's a project by project decision, uh, the way, uh, the way customers buy Azure. Um, and so that was moving at a very, uh, small pace. Um, so I did a cohort analysis and, uh, showed that analysis as part of this.

Yeah, I had, so, um, the, the way the team was structured was I had a couple of vendors helping me with, uh, analysis. Uh, I had a team, um, and I was focused on the deep dive for, uh, manufacturing segments and the education segment, uh, whereas my colleagues from corporate strategy were focused on a few other, uh, industries. So that was

Yeah, so that was the team structure and my manager and the manager from corporate strategy were the leads.

Um, I'm trying to think, for this specific uh instance. I think, um, so when, so one of my vendors was helping me with interviews across the company, OK? And uh I had tasked that vendor with what are the key scenarios that we should go after, um. And he basically came up with scenarios that Microsoft was already going after or like we, we already had within, within our site. And where I challenged him was, uh, is this like, don't limit yourself to what Microsoft thinks it can do today, but also look at, make that external outside analysis, um, and that's when the product simulation aspect uh came up.