When I was doing my MBA and preparing for placements, we would read up on prospective employers. Amazon and Microsoft are extremely sought-after employers . While reading up about both these companies I also looked at their Cloud businesses - what do they sell, how does they work, key buzzwords, etc. Typical MBA bullshitter with surface level knowledge trying to sound intelligent stuff.

The Cloud is complicated, go to any of their websites and you will be flabbergasted with the sheer number of service offerings. 150+ different services a piece. WOW. And to top it off, the user experience in the cloud sucks. I will concede it is not meant for beginners. Companies can trust the cloud provider with their entire technical infrastructure, so these cloud services are LEGO blocks but for experts . Yet, looking from the outside for the first time, it can seem very intimidating.

I wrapped up my notes, went through placements and voila I was going to be joining Microsoft. As is common, I did not know which team I would be joining; these are allocated later based on requirements. I got a jolly good surprise when I found out that I was going to be working in the Network Monitoring team in Azure. Network what?! These confusing and complicated cloud interfaces were the arch-nemesis of my product management career. I was a discipile of the Steve Jobs school of thinking and always looked at myself as building elegant and cool looking consumer products, simplifying things and going on stage to give fancy keynotes . And here I would be building something I didn’t even understand.

No really! Being an honest and overtly diligent human being, I decide to show up to work fully well read about the product and the industry. Yet when I looked up some of the teams’ blog posts, I barely understood a word. Welp! So I had to decide, should I work here or move on to something else? Here’s how the decision played out in my head. First, the cloud was booming. In the past decade and a half, billions of people had literally been swallowed up by the digital technology. 24*7 we’re Whatsapping, tweeting, instagramming, whatever . The digital genie was out of the bottle and there was no going back. And yet, the internet was nascent. Only a few companies had adopted technology. 2/3rds of the world did not have internet access . As I saw it, I in the next 30-40 years every inch of humanity will be covered in screens, connected to more apps, more sensors, generating more data and needing more cloud . This train could be ridden for a long time, and it was already a $80 Bn market.

Second, I felt working in B2B setting where I wasn’t a natural customer would make me a more honest product manager. B2C PMs have the luxury of intuition . I have a small amount of automatic experience as a consumer even if I represent just one segment. Not the case when you’re building for power users in the enterprise . I thus far hadn’t ever woken up wondering if the latency between my servers was optimal, but thousands of network admins and devops engineers do. And it would be a nice challenge to try and understand the workflow of someone else completely removed from your experience and build useful products for them.

Third, I am a fairly technical person but since becoming a PM about 4 years ago, I had slowed on technical learning in lieu of business, process and team-building knowledge (as was appropriate). While I did feel intimidated at first, I saw no harm in trying. I could always quit or change teams . But as someone with an engineering and a fair interest in technology, it behoved me to at least give it a short.

Fourth, should I survive, I would also get a career moat. Transitioning from a job that required generic PM skills to one that also requires solid tech chops is hard . The other way around is easier. There would be tons of niche jobs, startup and side-project ideas that a lot of folks outside of this domain would never be able to access.

Finally, Microsoft is a forgiving employer, it’s not perform or perish cultue. Failure is not catastrophic, you get time to learn and ramp up. So I felt comfortable taking this leap. All said and done, despite being a seemingly challenging and unsexy area of business, I saw good reason to give it a shot. And here I am ~2 years later!