Negotiating with emotion

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In my daily work, I am often negotiating with people. Either close colleagues or remote partners working on the same project. I noticed that my negotiation skills varies a lot depending on who I am talking with and on my personal emotional state. Going into negotiation late in the day after a stressful week is often the key for a pretty hard discussion. My biggest principle in negotiation and interaction with humans in general is respect. As long as the players are respecting each other, the discussion generally stays mostly reasonable. However, I was looking for some other techniques I could use to improve myself.
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Strategy for ads placement with Infinite Scroll (WordPress)

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Some high profile website (Facebook, Linkedin) have enable infinite scroll (automatically displays following pages when the user scroll down) on their pages.
This is mostly because infinite scroll is supposed to increase user stickiness to a site. One obvious problem with infinite scroll is that the ad placement needs to be updated.

Without infinite scroll the user would likely browse from page to page and the ads where evenly distributed across the page and most likely on top of the page, where most users spent most time.
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The first 90 days: Promoting yourself!

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I am starting a new series of posts pulled out of a book I recently read. The book was written by Michael Watkins and titled “The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels
“. The book is about enabling transitioning leader to reach the breakeven point (when leader contributed as much value to their organization as they have consumed from it) as rapidly as possible. The book comes with 4 propositions:
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Microsoft Program Manager Interviews

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So you want to be a program manager at Microsoft?

I have just been through the interview process, multiple time actually, so I can share some of the findings I made.

The typical interview process at Microsoft is based on 4 interviews (and a 5th one if you did well enough to the previous interviews). Each of the interviewer are going to focus on a particular aspect of the skill needed to be a good PM and also generally decide if they would like to work with you.
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5 things you can do to avoid hurting your own cause.

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Nice blog post from Dorie Clark, she share 5 tips to avoid hurting your cause when trying to persuade others in the workplace.

  1. Painting a black-and-white scenario: do not idealize your approach nor demonized the other’s point of view or ideas.
  2. Offering your opinion when it hasn’t been requested: try to engage positively with your listener.
  3. Assuming you already know other’s viewpoint: do not base your argument based on assumption on what other might think.
  4. Making it ad hominem: respect the people you are talking to, do not force them to be in a defensive mode.
  5. Launching into your script: control yourself, don’t over extend when selling your cause.

Quite a good reminder, eh?

Career switch from test to program management

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After 4 years as a software development engineer in test I had the feeling that I needed a change. I was driven into testing because of my passion for customers and high quality software, time taught me that both can also be achieved from the program management perspective. My personal skills set and my preferences lead me to decide to give a try to program management, even if it is a risky move (I strongly believe that going out of your comfort zone is, more often than not, a good thing for your career and for your knowledge).

6 months ago, I decided to go “all in” in program management and started interviewing inside Microsoft to get a position. At the beginning, the interviews were quite epic… I quickly noticed that I had to change my perspectives on engineering. I was often told that I had the DNA of a PM but still I wasn’t offered any jobs L. Each interview I had was a great way for me to learn something and increase my awareness on the skills needed. If I recall correctly, I had more than 20 interviews setup during the last 6 month. I took me quite some personal work and lengthy night to gain all the skills necessary to be a PM.

Finally, I was able to find a good fit for me and I started this week. I joined the Bing Ads team (formerly known as AdCenter). This is an incredible opportunity for me and a business (ads) I am already familiar with.

I a future post, I will summarize tips and preparation steps to have a great interview loop (an interview loop is typically composed of 5 interviews) as a Program Manager at Microsoft.