The following is a list of skills I gained working at Microsoft from 2016-2021. I mostly came to appreciate these skills after I left.
- Execution - Delivering what you say you’re going to do is really important, especially when there’s major customer facing milestones. I learned how to motivate people, communicate up and down and generally how to keep things on track
- Focus on design details - When you own a small part of a big puzzle, it’s becomes important to obsess over details. I spent a lot of time on subtle UI and interactions like font, animations, color choice etc.
- How to talk to users- I learned to appreciate how important it is to continuously talk to customers, both to keep a pulse on issues that persist and anything new that comes up. I learned how to conduct effective user interviews and synthesize feedback. This includes doing focused usability studies but also more broadly trying to understand user pains, without leading them to a particular answer
- Analyzing data - It is very important to know your numbers inside and out prior to presenting anything. This forced me to really understand which numbers were important to look at, how to get it, and also how to do open ended analysis.