I was fortunate to be part of some incredible and transformative product launches and initiatives, including:

The Surface launch

This was an amazing learning experience on how to ship consumer hardware products, retail experience, packaging, supply chain and logistics, reverse logistics, ecommerce, billing, Customer support and our team powered all the IT systems that drove all these experiences.

The Xbox Ambassadors program

This program really showed how much the Xbox team cared about gamers, gaming community and how creative the team was. We transformed the regular MSN messenger service to a customer support engine with regular gamers signing up to help other gamers. We became the runners up of Engineering excellence awards that year for the inguinity of the engineering solution and customer first mentality

Xbox One launch

This was an epic launch of the next generation of Xbox console, the original design was too progressive for the time and took several years before all platforms adopted the same approach to gaming. Every system that support the Xbox 360 and original Xbox was rebuild from the ground up to support the new vision. I still remember the mad rush to release and endless nights and weekends. Amazing learning in terms of how you have to market and bring the customer along with you on your vision on what future looks like.

Microsoft Store migration

All the folks that had anything to do with Consumer facing web properties, ecommerce, Infrastructure from across Xbox, Windows, Windows Phone were all assembled to form a team to move the billion dollar+ revenue Microsoftstore.com property to inhouse infrastructure. I am especially proud of the highly available, performant, web fronts that we built to support the store and complete the migration without any revenue loss. Incredible learning in terms how to built a web property that can scale to support a storefront that generates billions of dollars in revenue. Some of the tech we built are now the backbone of Dynamics 365 services and processes the entire commerse system that handles the $100 Billion+ revenue every quarter!

Moving Azure Infrastructure and services to a new secure identity

This was another major undertaking that I was personally driving with a relatively small team of very talented and driven set of folks. The goal was to move the entire Azure Infrastructure from Identity A to a more secure hardened Identity B that is ready for the ever changing threat landscape for a critical infrastructure like Azure that run the most critical workloads of our customers and do that without taking any downtime or causing disruptions to Azure services for both internal and external customers. We build innovative capabilities that were later recognized with patents and graduated to customer offerings like Azure Lighthouse to enable this migration. The most incredible part of this job was that I was in contact with every service team in Azure and helped me ramp up as TPM within Azure and learn the breadth of Azure services. This was also learning in terms of how to scale as a PM across 600+ Azure services and make things happen.

The JEDI push

Eventhough at the end of the day the JEDI contract was scrapped and broken into several smaller contracts, it became the most significant jump for Azure in terms for readiness for the most critical, most demanding DoD workloads, and let to Microsoft winning many other sovereign cloud contracts. Over a short period of time we made so much progress in building and enhancing capabilities to meet the stringent requirements put forward by DISA for DoD IT systems. Most of Azure was living the Cloud Collaboration Center(CCC) during this time.

Secure Future Initiative (SFI)

This was the time when the cat and mouse game of attackers and defenders of IT systems took new levels of escalation with nation states joining the fun. Microsoft had to fundamentally change how it build, shipped and operated the software and infrastructure. Our team team owned several SFI initiatives that lead to the hardening of the systems that we have today.

Quality Excellence Initiative (QEI)

The emergency nature of SFI initiatives, and the rate at which changes were coming to the systems meant, that we had to now focus on the quality of the change management infrastructure, so that we keep the reliability promises we made to our customers. Luckily for us, we were already running a Platform safety program much before that and this initiative helped us ramp up quickly and adapt quickly to the requirements and new standards that were set forward for Azure and other consumer facing services.

The Platform Operations Safety program

This is very close to my heart, as I was personally responsible for turning the manual touch reduction program to a full fledged, Platofrm Operations Safety program. We created a small team of dedicated folks who were fully bought into the vision and even after the the leadership org structure changing every 6 months or so, we stuck the program goal that was set for us by ScottGu.

I am glad that when I am leaving the company, this baby is in good hands with all the programs in place to execute it through to the end goal.

I had the incredible opportunity to work with some of the most brilliant and creative humans, and learn from them. Another aspect of my career in Microsoft was the ability to support some great organizations and causes through the GIVE program at Microsoft.

Thanks to everyone who made this journey memorable and help me learn and grow along the way.