A Look Back at My FIRST YEAR at Microsoft
It has been 1 year since I started my new role as a Developer Relations (DevRel) PM at Microsoft.
When I published my first blog about starting this role, I got this private message:
“This job sounds like a dream, but let’s see how you’d feel about it in 1 year.”
So what is it that I’m doing?
DevRel has many shapes, colors, and motivations from an organizational perspective.
I am specifically working as a DevRel community PM for Middle-East & Africa, which means that I’m partnering with technical communities in my region to open their hearts and minds and tell them the story of our technology, to listen and learn, and build better products for them. I’m part of a global team as each member of my team lives in a different country. Though I’ve worked before with colleagues from different countries, being part of a team that is so diverse made me a much better person as it taught me to embrace the differences in cultures, backgrounds, thought, and perspectives.
Despite being so different, there are so many similarities as we all share the same vision and values. We are blessed to have a safe environment where we are encouraged to be open, transparent, and discuss hard topics and know that our team members will respect our thoughts and will treat us with kindness and empathy.
Not only is my team so diverse, but also the region under my responsibility. I’m based in Israel and used to a western, advanced society, while my region has a huge variety. MEA (Middle- East & Africa) region has 72 countries, and it’s one of the most complex regions in the world, and one of the most diverse places in terms of religion, language (2060 different languages and dialects), and culture.
How do you create an impact on such a diverse location?
Let me highlight a few of the great initiatives that I took that were so much fun working on and helped me grow professionally as well as personally.
At about 2.5 months after starting my work, I had the opportunity to be part of a global, massive conference that Microsoft organized for developers around the world — Ignite the tour (30 countries around the world).
I was responsible for the community areas at Johnsburg and Israel locations where I was partnering with community leaders, hosting lectures, and generating conversation and interest between community members.
This conference was my first trip to Africa, first conversations with African developers, and first traveling on my own without family or friends. Doing things for the first time is always exciting! This amazing conference taught me about the power of Microsoft — about the ability to teach and inspire — as well as skilled developers and organizations. I also learned a lot about the challenges, culture, and local communities in Africa.
Few days after this conference, I flew to the U.S to the Microsoft DevRel summit organization. We were offered to deliver a talk about any topics that we wanted for our advocacy broader team.
I filled out the form to talk about entrepreneurship models & women empowerment. I totally forgot about this submission; until 2 weeks before the summit, I figured out (by mistake) that my request was accepted. Imagine the horror that I had figuring that I’ll be speaking in front of a crowd of cloud advocates who had a day-job of speaking to massive crowds in the wildest, biggest events that you could think of. Those advocates have thousands of followers worldwide!!
At this lecture, Adi Polak and I presented the Lean canvas model and presented how can we help improve the presence of women at the tech conference.
I didn’t imagine how lucky I’ll be to be working on this project in the same year.
“You can’t be what you can’t see”
In the past few months, I’ve been working and contributing to turning this dream into reality with a team of champions. We created a full training course for Technical Women Speakers (Moran Weber, Michal Wosk, Shiri Hochhauser). This course includes worldwide famous public speakers like Miri Rodriguez, Donna Griffit, Dona Sarkar, Simona Cotin, and Uri Nativ.
This pilot will train 42 professional developers and architects with the help of 8 talented speakers mentors!
The program kicked-off successfully and the first lectures were incredibly inspiring!
If you are a female public speaker and didn’t sign-up yet on womenonstage platform, go ahead and do it right away!
Covid has arrived
In the first few months in my role, I was excited, empowered, motivated, and then covid hit.
I started the lockdown with a little kid at home and a husband who needs to go to work as he is a crucial worker.
Few days had passed, and the world was in a panic. Everyone’s morale was down and the government and other organizations needed to solve so many challenges.
After talking with developers, we understood that we must do something, act and help society.
My Israeli colleagues and I partnered with in.dev community and organized an online Hackathon. We were looking for solutions that could be tested quickly and implemented at scale to help fight the Covid-19 pandemic.
In numbers: 1460 participants, 24 nationalities, 30 mentors, 90 challenges, 12+ partners, and 50.000+ team messages.
Through an indoor positioning system via live streaming events platform, an online virtual workouts platform, an online shop that is accessible for the elderly, and many more, the finalists impressed our expert jury and used their tech power to solve real problems.
I’ve been organizing hackathons before but was overwhelmed to see how being part of a huge corporation helps to scale the projects. This is when I started to develop the scaling muscle and skill.
Keeping and sharpening my product skill
The first Covid wave was over and we understood that it’s not going to disappear. My global DevRel team thought about a way to help teach and entertain worldwide developers that can’t go to conferences and meetups due to the new situation posed by the pandemic. So, we came up with the LearnTV platform. LearnTV is the place to find the latest digital content and can always keep updated on the latest announcements, features, and products from Microsoft, live events, and conferences from all around the world.
I was responsible for defining and building the platform dashboard. I love data, dashboards, and products. I couldn’t be more proud to plan and execute this dashboard for a product that entertains and teaches skills to thousands of developers each month.
Should I quit my hobbies for a full-time position?
When I started this role, I was afraid that I’ll need to give up on my hobbies and things that fuel me. I was relieved to find out that it was the opposite. I was able to integrate some of my projects and hobbies into work and see how Microsoft will help them to grow.
One of those projects is managing the Merage startup competition.
The program includes an intensive 7-week program, aiming to help early-stage entrepreneurs (Female of any age or males above 45+) to develop, test, and validate their business models in order to build success.
22 Startups who were carefully chosen from over 370 applicants participated in two intensive months until the final; full excitement and one step closer to get the $100K.
This week, we had the final (virtually off-course) and next month, the winning team will be announced!
What a day of a DevRel community PM looks like?
A typical day includes a lot of conversations with communities to understand how we can help provide speakers, technical content, and a platform to teach skills to their developers. Moreover, our work includes building scalable programs and events for and with communities as well as contribute and mentor in various events and programs like African and Israeli hackathons, lecture at global conferences, making a lot of intros, arranging and speaking in front of young students to empower them to study STEM and learn about cloud concepts and more.
I am even more excited now than I was 1 year ago! As I continue to learn and meet more people, I understand that Microsoft (and especially DevRel) is even more amazing than what I knew and thought before entering the role. The sky is the limit to the growth potential and the impact that we can make.
The future?
Continue work on initiatives that excite me- Like the quarterly MEA female communities events with 20 female tech communities from the Middle-east & Africa!!
In our first session, we welcomed women in the hi-tech ecosystem to a joint session by Microsoft & LinkedIn to master how to rock their LinkedIn profile and learn about Microsoft Skilling initiative that will help them to skill up their career, improve their professional branding, and will help recruiters to better find them.
Another exciting program that I’m building with Microsoft Reactor is virtual training and inspiration lectures in a variety of paths, that will help developers and communities to skill up, win prizes, get certifications and badges for free. Stay tuned and follow the reactor meetup page.
What does my professional and personal growth look like?
Taking those great events, initiatives, and best practices and rolling it out as a worldwide initiative, I plan to continue the learning marathon about the various functions and groups in Microsoft. I will utilize the great and free learning resources, mentoring programs, and mainly continue to work on projects that inspire me.
Are you a developer from MEA? Do you belong to a tech community? Please reply with your community name and let us know how we can help. Interested to hear more about DevRel? write down topics that you would like me to cover.
