Validating Solutions At Scale featuring Felix Watson Jr. - Product Manager @ Microsoft

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On today's episode, I got to chat with Felix Watson Jr., Product Manager at Microsoft. With Microsoft's products being used by so many companies, I was curious to hear how Felix approached validating solutions at Scale, and he was kind enough to join the pod to discuss. And as an added bonus, Felix shared some killer advice for engineers looking to transition into Product as well as how Product Managers can work more effectively with their engineering counterparts.

Here's what we discussed:

Felix started his career in computer engineering

5 years into his engineering career, Felix discovered Product Management

The use case that sparked Felix's fire for Product and his desire to transition

The path Felix took to make that leap from Engineer to Product

Felix's first role as a PM for Microsoft with the Dynamics 365 product

Now Felix works on the Azure team, supporting the support engineers with internal and customer-facing tools

Felix's advice for transitioning into Product and how you don't necessarily need side projects to prove your abilities

The ultimate example of leading by influence

How important it is for engineers to understand the customer and the use cases (the "why") behind what you're working on

The best insights come from qualitative research, which doesn't scale, but you can use quant data to validate the scale of the qual insight

How Felix systematically leverages customers to ensure they're solving the right problem in the right way

Why Felix didn't focus on industry-specific solutions rather on a horizontal solution to meet the scale and variety of customers Microsoft serves

The risks of trying to validate solutions at scale

What Felix would have done differently in validating qual insights with quant data

How important it is to define success metrics upfront to know whether your effort was a success or failure

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