⚒️ Community, Resilency, and Purpose: Themes from My Product Making Career
What I've learned to value in a product culture
My job for the past decade has been to transform SharePoint - a product with a 23-year history - into a modern cloud web app with a much higher design and usability bar and then build a suite of new cloud-first, AI-first products on top of the platform.
Recently, I shared on LinkedIn a historical recap of this past decade long journey of UX transformation and new product creation:
Modern SharePoint: A Brief History of Product Making (LinkedIn)
Writing that piece made me reflect about what’s most important to me as a product maker. It made me realize there are three key themes that I continually come back to that give me energy as a product leader:
Community. As Bill Gates once said, “You are only a platform if your partners make more money than you do.” The best part of my job is working with the community around our product, many of whom have bet their careers and livelihood building on top of the work of my team. Managing and nurturing an economic ecosystem is both a privilege and responsibility, and it creates a unique set of stakeholders and superfans that are influential to my thinking as a product leader.
Resiliency. Most products fail. Those that don’t still tend to fade away over time. Longevity is rare in our industry. Yet SharePoint’s been around for 23 years, and these past ten years are just its latest pivot to thrive across a paradigm shift. This requires a product culture that champions resilency, which to me means two things. First, it means building trust with customers and being a partner with them through change. Second, from a business perspective, it means learning to love the grind and respect the power of compounding growth. The Office business (which we are part of) consistently finds a way to grow revenue by 10-15% every year. For a business in the tens of billions of dollars, that’s like growing several new S&P500-sized companies every single year!
Purpose. SharePoint helps people collaborate remotely. It gives me deep purpose to know how much this technology helps bring ever more diverse teams and ever larger organizations together in a more productive way. We wouldn’t have had a COVID vaccine as fast as we did if people couldn’t collaborate remotely. Our technology helps teams working on global warming exchange information on novel solutions. It helps democratic institutions find consensus faster. Yes, my personal impact is a mile wide and an inch deep on these problems - but no other area of technology is as transformative at helping groups of humans collaborate on the world’s toughest problems.
As a tech leader, I often look to the future more than the past. But this week’s post takes a moment to breathe and looks at what I’ve learned to value based upon where I’ve been.
READ MORE: Modern SharePoint: A Brief History of Product Making