Company: Microsoft
Date: 2012-08-02
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

Subsidiary and Corporate Product Marketing Experience across multiple products and businesses
Pros: Lots of smart, passionate people. Great reputation and history. Great opportunities for future (Windows 8, Windows Phone, Xbox). Can find great spots to flex your strengths. Solid set of resources to tackle big problems.

Culture is more about what you get done than 'just looking good' (although the politics unfortunately corrode this 'pro')
Cons: Too much of an emphasis on efficiency and not enough on efficacy. Senior leadership struggling to value vision along side cold hard numbers. Still see marketing as a cost and not an investment. 

Career goal “having an individual impact”; Operating models, work flow, stale and ineffective process, duplication of roles, crossover of responsibilities resulting  in duplication of effort and lack of accountability coupled with nonexistent budgets reduce ability for subsidiary Product Marketing to have an individual impact. 

Many teams have a 'yes' culture and a pervasive inability of teams to work well together (I have experienced this far and wide).

Where there are people there are politics, however it is often chronic at Microsoft where those who crush others and take credit for others work (even their subordinates) are the ones who climb the ladder. We are then left with a leadership of ladder climbers rather than true leaders. People will follow true leaders and unfortunately there are not enough true leaders at Microsoft.

Deeply flawed review model that only allows the best to 'escape' to other teams.

Fix the review model which is a joke. Fix how we measure 'how' which as it stands only reinforces politics and popularity contests. Fix how managers vs. non-managers in the 63-64 band are measured. These should be crystal clear and documented types of impact and expectations. Change how the curve is enforced enabling teams to trade between levels and compensation buckets so that the appropriate message can be sent to employees vs. forcing the current curve on all organization as if they were all the same, which they are not e.g. senior vs. junior orgs, orgs with lots of high performers vs. those with average performers etc. We employee *how many HR* professionals they have to be able to figure this stuff out.

Career goal “increased impact through management and leadership”; Lack of mobility for ICs due to combination of flat org and lack of new blood/talent. In sub there doesn’t appear to be career progression outside of management. Often those chose to be managers do not appear to be in that role due to passion for managing and growing teams, or in the increasing their scope of impact, rather they appear to be there as it’s the only ‘way up’.