Ashwin Appiah ('06)
The Long and Winding Road to MS-Teams
Christian Fulghum (’77):
Tell me about what you did after high school.
Ashwin:
I went to LA, attended University of Southern California, with a dual major in computer science and business. That was my main draw down to USC, because they offered that program, and it was a good change from Seattle. Los Angeles was great.
Christian:
USC is certainly a popular college choice for many Owls.
Ashwin:
Absolutely. LA was amazing, and I think it was a good change, because I had lived in Seattle most of my life.
Christian:
What happened after that?
Ashwin:
I went straight into business consulting right afterwards, stayed in LA, and I really did not like it. It felt like I couldn't see the end product of my work. I think that was the main issue for me. Throughout college, and before, I was heavily involved in end-to-end projects where I actually delivered and provided something to the end customer that was tangible. I realized I wanted to get back into the tech world and the PM [product manager] role, and that the larger software companies were something that always interested me. It was a good mix between looking at the technical side and really building products that work, and looking at the business side of building a strategy for a product, and it was a good in-between.
Christian:
This is a good point to underline, because that the role you just described, of being the person who can talk to the C-suite and the person who can talk to the people who actually do the building and engineering is, I call it a “translator” role. You're entrusted with information, and you're also helping two parts of the organization that don't necessarily see the world the same way understand each other's needs and capabilities and viewpoints.
Ashwin:
Absolutely. In a spectrum of how you communicate your ideas changes from the C-suite as you mentioned, an external C-suite, especially when the type of products that you work on sometimes you need to be able to work with the CIO's of companies as well, and being able to sell the product versus going all the way down and talking to engineers who are very technical, and being able to inspire them to be able to build what were the ideas and the things that we want to build. So being able to cater to that audience is that key skill that PMs really refine over the years in terms of going from that spectrum and across the board. Obviously, you need to change your ways of communication based on who you're talking to. I think that's something that's really interesting for me as well.
Christian:
You made this shift from business consulting to product management, and did you go to Microsoft right away, or were you someplace else?
Ashwin:
I went to Microsoft right away. I started working at Microsoft in 2011 for the CRM offering that Microsoft has called the Dynamics CRM. It was great. It was a product that was hard for me, as someone right out of college, to grok. I had never used CRM before, so it was really good learning, especially around how to build a business product. I refined how to be a PM in those two years I was there. But eventually I moved to a more consumer product, Bing, which is Microsoft's search offering. In there, it really started my passion for search and discovery, building products that allow you to be able to get the right information at the right time at the right place. I think that was what really refined what kind of PM I want to be and the passions that I have for being a PM.
Christian:
Can you say more about that?
Ashwin:
Product Management is a wide role. It can mean many different things in different companies and contexts. But at the end of the day, as a PM you get to be passionate about an area, and to build a product in response to a set of needs. I could probably be a PM in aerospace or defense companies. I could do that work, but I'm probably not passionate enough about it to be as successful as I am in my present work.
Search and discovery became my passion and being able to deliver products that just work for the user. You don't have to go search for exactly what you're looking for. It just pops up to you. For example, a lot of the projects I worked on in the early stages of my career, when Google and Bing were building out that context card in search results. When you search for Michael Jordan, you don't have to go to the Wikipedia of Michael Jordan to see who he is. On the right hand side of Google and Bing it just shows you that rich contextual information. I built that out for all of restaurants and the restaurant experiences for Bing. So when you search for Cafe Flora, for example, all that contextual information on the right side that allows you to get that information without even going into the website was something that I led and built when I was at Bing. So that was a great experience.
But after the first five years in my career, I wanted to step back and think about what I wanted to do next. One day I just quit my job and went down to San Francisco on a whim and decided I'm going to try to see how this startup experience is going to be, and how I could learn how to be a PM at a five-person startup. That was my next stage of my career, where I just went down to San Francisco. Luckily, I found a job at a 150-person startup. I was the first PM there, surprisingly. It was a whole different experience. I was at Microsoft for so long with such an established PM role, and then transitioning to a startup where it felt like the wild, wild west.
First, I had to create the whole process of how we built products. Second, from a strategy point of view, I had figure out where we were going. So that was a really interesting experience. As startups go, there are ups and downs in funding and no funding and things like that. But at the back of my heart, I always wanted to go and work for a search and discovery product.
Eventually I got poached by another company that was really shifting their strategy for search and discovery for their mobile search app. They were trying to figure out where they wanted to go next. It was a great time for me to come onboard and define that strategy for them. We overhauled the whole app to be more of a discovery app rather than a search app. After six or seven months we got bought by Snapchat. So the roller coaster of all of that was really interesting for me, because of the fact that I went down just to experience startup world. I was fortunate in that I experienced all stages of a startup.
It was the heyday of Snapchat. It was at the peak, and it was just really cool to just go from a fledgling startup to really small startup to merging into an up and coming app right before they IPO’d [made their initial public offering]. I stayed and worked for Snapchat for a while. Then two years ago, I moved back up to Seattle and started working for MS-Teams.
Christian:
I love your story, because you get your degree, you try the thing that seemed like maybe the smartest thing for you to do when you graduate. “I'm going to be a management consultant. That's where the money is. That's where I can add value.” After giving that a try, you had the clarity to say, "No, this is not what I want." You knew that was because you couldn't see the end product of what you were doing. You were giving input and wondering, “Did they even read it? Did they listen to me?”
Ashwin:
Yes!
Christian:
Then you went to an established company in Microsoft. Then you took the risk of a startup. You rode that along and did the acquisition transition. And then coming full circle back to Microsoft with Teams, what a wonderful story. Was it Teams that prompted you to text me on the Facebook feed and say, "This is cool to see Middle Schoolers using something I built?"
Ashwin:
Absolutely. Absolutely. My manager actually, her son is going to Overlake. She wasn't my manager then. It was a recent move, actually. She texted me or sent me a picture of her using live events at Overlake, and she didn't know I went to Overlake. I just found it fascinating that Overlake was using a product that I built. Obviously there's a whole slew of educational institutions that use our product, but it just hit me differently to see my high school use it to bridge a gap between offline and online.
Christian:
Well, that goes back to your earliest comment about wanting to see the product of your work. That's a really wonderful story. How many people work on Teams?
Ashwin:
Teams is actually really massive. Teams as a whole, I believe, is around 1,500 people. So it's a massive operation between services and the client work. But the Meetings team is rather small. The Meetings and Live Events team is around 100. We're rather small, and we're growing a lot product-wise ever since I joined. It's probably grown usage-wise, like 10 or 20 times. It's a growing product, and for me, coming back to Microsoft, I wanted to work for a product that was new, and that has high growth. I didn't want to go work for a mature product such as Word or PowerPoint. I wanted to work for something that was new and that was growing. Teams was that place.
That was one of the main reasons why I came back to Microsoft. I had offers other places, but I wanted to come back to work, one, for a team that was growing and a product that was growing and that had an impact. So when I first joined Microsoft, I was tasked for bringing live events and broadcasting into Teams. That was one place where we wanted to invest in because of the fact that we had numerous different companies having needs for their all-hands and their assemblies and things that were more one-to-many. Because of the fact that meetings has a limit at 250, we needed something that went beyond. So I was tasked to do that. It was quite a journey.
Christian:
Wow. What advice would you give your middle schooler or high school self now that you know what you know?
Ashwin:
I'll be very honest with you. I do a lot of recruiting events at colleges and things like that these days. These college kids are way more talented than when we were in college. So I just feel a little under-qualified to be giving advice to high schoolers, because I'm pretty sure they know the ins and outs of everything these days. Because when we were in high school it wasn't like the entrepreneurship field and the building apps, startups field was not that easily available for us to be able to build an app, for example. Now, I'm pretty sure all high schoolers are doing their own thing, side gig as well as going to high school.
That said, the advice I would give any middle schooler or high schooler is just go out and build. If you have an idea, don't just keep it within you. Just go out, try to make it happen. There will be someone, something, some place, some resource that will aid you to get that idea out in the world. You never know what that idea is. That idea that you have, you might think, someone's probably thought about it. You never know. So always try to go out and just build, and get your ideas out there.
Christian:
I think the message of your entire story is, if you really are clear on why something isn't working, as opposed to just being vaguely unhappy, then that's an important insight to respect. No amount of money will make up for a job that you aren’t happy with. We all need a worthy challenge.
Ashwin:
Absolutely. I think it's important to have those principles, being clearly defined about who you are, and what lights you up. You go into college thinking I'm going to go do this, and then you discover there are new things to be excited about, new things to learn.
Christian:
Thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me today. Are there any teachers that you remember from Overlake who were particularly influential on you?
Ashwin:
Yeah, there are a bunch. Sue Havilland [math] was really great. In sixth grade, Mrs. Finks was my English teacher. I was in her homeroom and she was awesome. I went to Project Week with her as well, and her husband Harry, and it was just great.