Driving intrapreneurship within a large company

Hi Everyone, I am the General Manager for Microsoft Teams Rooms Managed Services. This is a managed service where we run Teams meeting rooms on your behalf, either directly or with the support of one of our amazing managed service partners. (I think of our work with partners as experts coming together with other experts to make you successful!)

I got a question a little while back on what it took to create a new service from scratch in a giant company like Microsoft. Intrapreneurship in a large company is no small challenge, it takes getting a few things right. I thought I would share the insights from building this service over the last two years. I know a little about this because this isn't my first intrapreneurship - one of my earlier projects was building Office 365! With an numbered list of insights, off we go!

1. Direct customer feedback: Microsoft has a great relationship with enterprise customers and they trust us to follow through on our bets. In the case of this service, they trusted us and were willing to grow with us. These folks were invaluable (and are still invaluable) in providing us feedback and helping us learn what the service needs to contain. If there is ONE benefit to doing intrapreneurship in a large company it is this access to customers. It is more important than anything else, more important than the money, systems, resources, anything.

2. Building a critical mass of endpoints to get signal: We needed signal so we could build up our own expertise in doing room operations (we had never done it before). We approached this by initially running a service for customers room trials. A trial is best when someone is watching over it to make sure nothing goes wrong and this is what our management service did. Once we had customers we didn't limit their trials, we let them grow as big as they wanted.

The rooms trial program allowed us to create a critical mass of live rooms to learn from and build the backend intelligence. We coded that expertise into the software of our "Intelligent SOC" (systems operations center) that is the backbone of our service. Giving nice room trials was a business problem we wanted to solve anyway, and doing it gave us real, ramped, experience in what running a 24x7 service would entail. We ran the trials program for a year before we flipped the priority and focused full time on the managed service.

3. Building a knowledge base: At first this takes time, but as you run in multiple diverse environments you get a strong system with good feedback. There is an incredibly tight feedback loop between our tier three system engineers who handle the most complex customer problems and our developers. In addition, our service platform is extensible, so we can quickly deliver new operations capabilities without writing code. Anything new that we learn in one customer is quickly applied across our entire customer base. With enough signal we see any new issue in the ecosystem almost immediately, and we can proactively get ahead of that issue for all of our customers.

3. Executive support: We are VERY fortunate to have great executives willing to bet on an idea, give us funding to build it out, and allow us to experiment. Without that trust we would have gone nowhere. Bob Davis and Brad Anderson deserve a lot of credit for being our "Angel Investor" and "Venture Capitalist" within Microsoft. We actually refer to them this way because that is the way they operated and they gave us the freedom to build as if we were a startup organization. A call out to all execs - be willing to experiment with lateral businesses that make strategic sense. After all they can grow into Office 365!

4. Building an entrepreneurial team culture (within a very big company): Sometimes it is hard to get people (and I'm talking about people joining your team) to bet on a new idea in a big company. There are always more stable and secure things they can work on that seem like (and often are) a more predictable way to build their career. However, if the leaders in your org are passionate about creating a new business opportunity, you can find people that are passionate about working with you. Frankly, I think some people, (not everyone, but some) in large organizations are crying out to be set free, and while they can do other jobs, they really only become their "whole self" in an entrepreneurial environment. For these people, I think their best career success comes when they find these opportunities! It isn't for everyone but it comes with a certain freedom you don't typically find in a big company. Having an inclusive and entrepreneurial culture is critical to attracting these folks. To encourage this, we run our team on just two principles:

1. Ownership – Everyone is given a LOT of ownership of their work and decision making. I know I like this, and I suspect others do too. The decision making structure is very flat, and everyone is expected to act like an owner. That is the flip side of the ownership coin.
2. Approachability – Everyone, and I mean everyone - top down, bottom up, and sideways - in the team works hard to be approachable to each other. This leads to inclusiveness and really high internal team trust. It is the best thing about working in our team.

These two principles are simple to remember and they make a huge difference if everyone lives by them. The organizational health index is a measure of team health at Microsoft and ours is 90%. It is mainly because of these two things.

5. Let new ideas flourish and don't mainstream them too early (or at all): Too often I've seen a new idea either get too much internal competition from an existing business or get pushed into a narrow and restrictive technology path by existing architecture. You don't want to re-invent, but if you want innovation, sometimes you have to give it room outside of the current set of business or technology assumptions.

6. Be prescriptive: When it comes to managing a complex system like a meeting room system, figuring out what to deploy and how to do it properly can take up a lot of time. Things go better when you get the right setup, so we invest in knowing how to properly deploy our customers from the start. We have also learned to come into a messy environment and detect and cleanup extraneous software or services that cause problems. Our goal is to get customers to the golden configuration appropriate for their environment and keep them there, even as they grow.

7. Cables 😊: You would be amazed at how sensitive room systems are to bad or improper cabling (faulty cables, kinks in cables, incorrect cables, etc) and what weird, transient, errors they can cause! Beyond knowing the common issues, we are starting to use machine learning to detect when this might be a problem. Rooms as a managed service gives us a big dataset where we have a fast customer feedback loop on whether the system is working. Confirmed outcomes to problems in a relatively fixed multi-variable environment = training data; so ML can help! We’re really excited about the potential of ML on multiple fronts: security, predictive maintenance, fault detection, etc.

I hope this was interesting, let me know what you think in the comments, and enjoy building your services as much as I enjoy working on this one! Thanks Microsoft!