Such a pleasure to talk to THE Christiaan Brinkhoff at Midwest Management Summit in May.

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Cool. So I have Christian, Good to see you. I see you quite a lot of events. You do you come to the end of events quite often. Yeah. I, I love to meet with community, people like yourself, MP’s. I’ve been an MVP myself too, like roughly nine years ago. So really, I want to do something back, being part of Microsoft now, helping coaching people become part of the MVP community, but as well beyond that, so supporting every initiative and the initiative like yourself doing in the UK too, Right. I didn’t know you were an MVP. I was, did you stop being an MVP because of going with my Microsoft? Kind of. So I joined Microsoft in 2018 as part of the Evans Logic acquisition, which is the profile management solution for AD. And that worked in a way that you get a contract for one year after the acquisition. And I was in the Netherlands living there as a contractor. So I had a year long V Dash. They call it like a V dash contractor kind of account in Microsoft, but you’re still like an employee of course. So it could use or it could keep my MVP title for a little longer, right. So I kind of had like the MVP title for probably 2 years. So it could have it a little bit longer. But then I joined Microsoft as a full FD and then I had to give it back. But I think personally, the only good reason to give your title back is to join Microsoft. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So. So you joined Microsoft 989 years ago? Seven years, 7 1/2. What’s that like compared to being an external? Being an MVP working for FS logics? What was the? It’s a good question. I’m coming from the mindset of you can make your job the job that you prefer to do, and that’s kind of what happens. So I came into the company, I was able to kind of do a sniff kind of around for like roughly like 9 months, right? And to see, hey, is it if it’s like something I would be happy with, like working in Microsoft, being a big company, changing a little bit to the freedom you have as an MVP, like you’ll enjoy as well to being part of a product. I had the fortunate opportunity. To work on Azure virtual desktop back in the days WD yeah but as well build Windows 365 from from scratch from like 0 to like where we are right now yeah and that creates such a rewarding and energizing feeling next to us well building community as part of the product so I kind of think that I. Do a job that’s kind of like really sort of meant for me and meant to be for me. Coming from a background from community. Yeah. And product and innovation coming together as one. So kind of being an entrepreneur in Microsoft and growing and creating new things created a role that I’m doing right now that I’m really enjoying, which is not like the standard, hey, things you learn to out of school or university, right. So. So no one, I assume no one came to you and said I’d like you to do. This and this is how you’re gonna do it and you’re gonna do it with these tools and these and in this way it was more kind of you figuring out where you could kind of of course we use a lot of processes and software like in Microsoft to do your work on writing design specs. I’m doing like more to the Visual Studio kind of DevOps kind of pipeline like process of like creating. They called like scenarios for product management and such that dev look at and then they book. Vote I’ll OK, so that all works like the same as other VMS. So there’s definitely some, hey, you do this that way, but this program, so it’s not that I’m using my own tools and such, but I definitely figured something out. That is my mentor, my kind of spiel of how I do product management the best like talk with community, talk with our customer connection program community as well. And really like I kind of create a lot of insights while meeting with people that I can then bring back to the team and to the product to really work. From the customer, from the community to a better solution inside the product. And I think that’s the the best way to do product management. And that’s kind of how I kind of influenced a little bit my role to be a little different than a standard product manager. That what you said like you do it this way, you write a design, you talk with the developers, ship the code from self host to preview to public preview to GA and then review again and iterate on new iterations, right? I’m really like my role is really focused on the 1st. 20 to 30% of a product meaning I’m capturing an ID you can share something with me right now and I could be like hey this is pretty much maybe the next big thing we should do as a product team and then I’m formalizing that into a strategy paper or vision paper. And then as part of that I’m motivating the team internally to kind of build from business case the product and then the product goes in design and execution and normally that will be the phase when I’m opting out and go to a new project so that’s kind of my role and so you. To give you an idea now and you can that could start a process in your mind and then process your team. Is that why you come to events like this? Pretty much it’s, it’s one of the important components as well as meeting community meeting with a lot of people that could become an MVP. So I’m also kind of a little bit of a coach slash MVP recruiter as I’m leading our MVP programs for Ministry 65 and Azure Virtual Desktop, right. So that meeting new people just of course. Having fun chat with new people is one of the big things at MMS. Yeah, as well as knowledge sharing because there are a lot of people here they’ve never seen the products actually working, like end to end. So I’m here as well to tell the story of the product. Right. And then as we’ll hear from the people in the audience, like, what should we do differently, better? Is it already good? And you need to help you connect you to the right people to maybe start a PC or a trial that are other things that I’m doing here. So you have a session. Did you speak about Windows 365? Yeah, I did. What’s new session on? What’s new with Windows 365 and Ava? We did a migration session how to go from Avid to Windows 365 and we’re doing in fact the closing AMA have will be speaking there as well at MMS where we will do an AMA with the audience for closing the event. Awesome. Well, great to speak to anyone. Take too much of your time. There’s a lot going on still the last day, but there’s a lot to do. So thanks for spending a few minutes with me.