Jackie, This was a fascinating read. Thanks for sharing!
I currently work as a PM at Microsoft working on Microsoft Teams. I certainly concur with your assessment that Microsoft, in general, is very top down in its product planning process, but my team in particular is making strides to adopt a model closer to what you’re leading at Asana.
To be more specific, we look to our leadership team to define the core objectives over the next year. Each team then identifies opportunities within their existing charter to contribute to these objectives. Where we differ from the rest of Microsoft is the length of our planning cycles and the relative ease with which individuals can influence the planning process.
Microsoft Teams plans on a MMMQQQ basis which is to say, we draw up quarterly plans which are most accurate and clear for the upcoming 3 months and become hazier as we look further out, toward the horizon.
While drawing up each quarterly plan, we look at multiple sources for inspiration. We solicit great ideas from the team itself, look at top customer feedback, listen to our sales team, incorporate our top takeaways from our user studies and so on. Of course we pay close attention to the direction of enterprise messaging space. We tie each of these individual ideas back to the core objectives and prioritize internally. While doing all this, in parallel we take a sneak peek at other teams plans to identify scenarios where we can we delight our users together.
The main deliverable of the above exercise is a team specific road map for the next 3 months and coarse view of the teams’ ambitions further out. Once every team has their road map defined, the leaders of each areas (mostly GPMs but occasionally Senior ICs are invited to represent their areas) meet for a quick review of the all up product road map. During this session, all teams are expected to present their road map and more importantly how it contributes to the core objectives laid out for the product. Doing so before all other stakeholders generates alignment across teams and helps identify any missed dependencies.
Would love to get your take on this
