Hardcore Software by Steven Sinofsky

Share this post
087. Reorg! Why Are We Together, Exactly?
hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com

087. Reorg! Why Are We Together, Exactly?

"This mission hardly starts from scratch. In fact, it starts from one of the greatest software assets in the history of the world—Microsoft Windows." — announcing the re-org

Steven Sinofsky
Jun 26
7
Share this post
087. Reorg! Why Are We Together, Exactly?
hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com

After thinking and writing to provide context to BillG, SteveB, and KevinJo, I had to begin the real work of changing the team. As much as I would have liked to avoid the second step of the “Three Envelopes” (having skipped the first) I found myself planning a reorganization. Not just a reorg though—Microsoft was by many accounts in a perennial state of “reorg hell”—I was planning an organizational change and cultural transformation that would have an effect on every member of the team, almost immediately. That meant more writing. More communicating. A lot more.

LISTEN to this post — NEW FEATURE — The audio for this post is embedded with the full text and all the images and supporting materials. You can listen right here in the browser or in the substack mobile app (iOS) which is super nice. The separate post with audio will still be there but the emails will stop after this week.

Back to 086. The Memo (Part 2)


Most big company reorgs are fairly routine affairs that nevertheless cause teams to drop everything, stress out over the weekend (because reorgs always happen on Fridays) and contemplate what might change. But then returning to work on Monday, little changes immediately except for somewhere up the org chain there’s a new boss who will in a matter of time introduce some changes. Most reorgs are not nearly as big a deal as all the time and energy that goes into talking about them.

This was especially true at Microsoft which, at least to many, felt like it was in a constant state of reorg hell. In my early days at the company, I experienced several reorgs in the most senior (other than BillG) executive structure from having a president to not having one, to adding a COO to removing a COO, three-in-a-box (the BOOP, Bill and the Office of the President), back to a president, then a president and COO, then SteveB as CEO and BillG as Chief Software Architect, and so on. Office itself bounced between a few executives over the years as well. In fact, just as I was in the middle of planning this June 2006 announcement, BillG announced he began transitioning from Microsoft to spend more time at the Foundation. Ray Ozzie (ROzzie) would be appointed Chief Software Architect (CSA).

The thing about reorgs is that most people are trained, best case, to scan the reorg mail and see if their team is directly affected by the change. Specifically, how far away is the new boss. If there’s no immediate impact, then just go on doing what they were doing. In practice, most reorgs at scale don’t affect most people directly or immediately.

The Windows and Windows Live changes were not like those reorgs. This was not a change at the top. This was a change for literally everyone in the organization. More than half the team would get new managers soon after Vista shipped, and everyone would have a new manager no more than three hops up the chain.

It was even more than just that. Jobs were changing and with that many mental models of career paths were being upended. Everyone who thought they had plans for what would be next would wake up to something different. Aspirational jobs as a PUM or an architect with no direct reports (or code) were no longer going to be available. We were an engineering organization, and everyone was going to be asked to focus their trajectory on building products. Even becoming a manager was deemphasized as we asked managers to take on more directs while we reduced the percentage of the team that were managers by one-third.

Then beyond that we had every intention of radically changing the way we would work. Everything from the planning process to daily builds to milestones. Even meetings with execs would decidedly change (or mostly go away).

I spent May and June 2006 on two things.

I was mostly meeting more people on the team and figuring out who would be filling in the organization I am about to describe. These meetings were a constant reminder of the desire for change. They were also opportunities forongoing reminders that Windows and Services are different and more difficult than Office. I probably wrote 500 long emails replying to questions about everything from the future of specific technologies (most of which I knew nothing about: USB, DirectX, virtualization, and more) or to suggestions for how we could improve. I received quite a few questions asking “how do you want us to…?” on everything from hiring to signing purchase orders. There were many questions that were very specific to situations and people that I knew nothing about. The questions always seemed to boil down to process and culture challenges, never about domain expertise. It was 7x24 from the end of March to the end of June.

To remain sane, I was also installing daily builds of Vista and Office 2007 which were both winding down. Not being in the daily triage meetings for Office was kind of sad for me. I vividly remember sneaking over to the ship-room meeting one time, which proved to be silly and indulgent on my part and a distraction to the team. It was, for me, a moment of sanity just to see the team working, and by that I mean not taking any code changes.

Mostly, however, I was genuinely scared. I had absolutely no doubts about what we needed to do, including how to structure the team and what to ask of them. I had a lot of doubt that I’d be able to pull it off and most days wondered if I was the right person to drive these changes. There was so much baggage coming from Office.

Something that I was keenly aware of was how many managers, myself included, viewed reorgs as something of an adversarial process. A reorg was something to protect the team from, not something that could help. Reorgs prevented work from happening and were a distraction. That’s certainly how I treated a lot of what went on above me for most of my career.

Now it was my turn. The very last thing the company needed was for people to view the changes I was putting in place to be prevented or redirected. I was terrified.

Would people quit? Or likely, how many people would quit?

Would people run to the gossipy press or Mini-Microsoft?

How much email would be sent to SteveB or BillG? And, yikes, would they answer it?

What if no one wanted any of the new jobs I was proposing?

My first step was to figure out the new leaders. In picking those leaders I was also certain of how the overall organization would be shaped, my direct reports and their direct reports and so on. This structural change was the visible symbol of the reorg. It was a massive pivot away from a product unit organization to what I called a “functional organization.” A functional organization is based on having discipline specific leaders reporting at the top and their teams consisting entirely of people within those disciplines of development, testing, and program management. Across each of the disciplines we would have mirror structures of group managers, leads, and individuals. I sketched out the math and knew we could build the organization out of about 40 teams of 25 developers each (and 25 testers and a dozen program managers, under their discipline leaders.) In due course, the intention would be to organize COSD this way as well though we needed to let them finish Vista for a bit more time.

I would love to spend more words in this section describing the inherent tradeoffs between these two organization types, but it would be a bit of a distraction from the story. Instead, I would refer the reader to Functional versus Unit Organizations, an essay I wrote in 2016 on this topic.1

In assembling a team of new leaders, I tried not to be the guy who brought “his people” from his old job, but there simply weren’t any candidates in Windows that would champion the changes we needed. You’re not supposed to show up with a team, but managers almost always do. I never understood why that was the case, but after living through this I have a more visceral understanding. It is not about the personal connection, as most think, but in times of change you need to have a team of people who share the same world view by default without having to guide at each step. Without that, change is impossible.

I thought I wasn’t going to be that exec, but I was. Only to a point, however. Within the team, I was able to find a balance of “natives” and “imports.”

Here’s how the leadership team shaped up: The Search team remained as it was, under Chrsitopher Payne (ChrisPa) working on its own roadmap and plans, but with much more capital and more people and soon a functional org structure. Chris Jones (ChrisJo), a longtime executive on the Windows Client team, would lead program management, design, and research for Windows Live Experience, WLX. Leading development would be Steve Liffick (SteveL.) Steve had Windows Live deep in his DNA, but he had been a program manager his entire career (having grown up in Seattle, interned at Microsoft, and joined straight out of college the same summer as I did.) The challenge facing the team was a lack of senior enough software engineering leadership to manage a team of several hundred, so he agreed to manage the engineering team and would prove to do an excellent job over time. Arthur de Haan (ArthurdH), a longtime test leader in Office who had built out the internet services operational infrastructure, also joined the team to lead test and internet operations.

The new name for Windows Client was the Windows Experience team, or WEX (pronounced weks). WEX needed a program management leader. In many ways this job was the program management job at Microsoft. Vista screamed out in need of program management—it needed a holistic view of the user, the customer, and the experience. Julie Larson Green (JulieLar) was ready for a new and bigger challenge after leading such an extraordinary effort redesigning the Office user interface. She was just recently promoted to vice president for that contribution on top of her long history of successful product development and team leadership.

Aleš Holeček (AlesH, which coincidentally is the proper pronunciation of Aleš) wore his Czech heritage proudly and maintained close connections to Prague, one of the most creative and vibrant tech communities in Europe. He also frequently, and inexplicably, wore bright red pants. AlesH was in the process of leading a rescue mission for large parts of the most visible portions of the Longhorn Reset. In short order, as a new hire to Microsoft, he had established himself as a strong leader and deeply knowledgeable and respectful of Windows as a third party developer, but also clear on where Windows needed to go. After several discussions, I sent him the shortest of emails asking if he wanted the job leading WEX Development. An hour later we had a leader.

The testing role for WEX was going to be the most visible testing leadership job in the entire company. Windows, almost more than anything, was a product of testing. Grant George (GrantG) was busy completing Office 2007 and was so focused he was reluctant to even chat about what comes next—focus was one of Grant’s defining traits as a test leader. In speaking with him, it was clear he was excited about the challenge. But he had also been much more deeply involved with Windows than I had considered, especially over the past few months, and hesitated because of his concerns about the culture. After a couple of weeks of being left to his own thoughts, he came back willing to sign up. This was a huge win for the team.

With a team in place, I penned the longest reorg mail of all time. In hindsight, this surprised nobody, but at the time it was, well, shocking. It was not just an announcement, but an explanation and justification for an organizational pivot—moving from product units to a functional organization with large groups of each engineering discipline and very few product unit managers. While not an intentional play on words, functional organization worked that way too.

From: Steven Sinofsky  Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2006 4:00 PM To: Platforms & Services Division <psd@microsoft.com> Cc: Executive Staff and Direct Reports <execdir@microsoft.com> Subject: Windows and Windows Live: Organizing for agility, Competing with focus, Building must-have software  Microsoft Confidential – All elements of this communication are strictly Microsoft Confidential. Our team has recently reached some significant milestones including releasing Vista Beta 2 and major updates to our Live Services.  Everyone has worked super hard and deserves a sincere thank you to all.  We are approaching Vista RC1 and Live will be moving from beta to release shortly, so everyone is very busy and that should clearly be the focus until these projects are complete. At the same time we must begin to prepare for the next generation of our products and services.  Over the past three months I have had the opportunity to listen to and to learn from many people across the organization—we have discussed the history of our team, the challenges, and the opportunities.  There is a clear consensus that for us to take our software to the next level for customers we need change—we need to change how we work together, how we plan the work we do, and how we are structured as a team.  The enclosed memo outlines the next steps for the Windows and Windows Live team and how we will organize to deliver focused software – focused on the competitive challenges we face, focused on building software and operating services for the broadest set of customers in the world, and focused on improving our planning and engineering. The enclosed memo (*IRM protected for the recipients of this mail*) is detailed because the scope of our work is broad and the situation warrants such discussion.  Everyone is encouraged to read the memo, ask questions of me (email, blog, in person) or your manager or my direct reports as there are likely points worth discussing and clarifying.  Our top priority is releasing Vista and Live services and so we are using this time to be deliberate about the changes and to work them one step at a time as we move to release. In September 2005, Kevin Johnson assumed the leadership of Platform and Services Division (PSD) with Jim Allchin leading the completion of Vista.  In the six months following, Kevin spent time learning about the organization and the business, and most importantly the people.  In March, the next changes were put in place.  This aligned our organization along functional lines including engineering groups for Windows Live Platform, Server & Tools, Online Services, Core Operating System, and our team Windows and Windows Live.  This announcement does not change this alignment. We are now taking the next step and aligning our efforts across Windows and Windows Live.  Today we are announcing an organization structure and a realignment of development efforts.  More than that, we are beginning the transformation to a new way of working to help us realize our goals of delivering better and cooler software to customers sooner and more effectively.  This structure and the role model that the management team is committed to establishing are the necessary first steps.  When combined with your efforts and your commitment to improving, we have all the right ingredients to deliver incredibly cool software. Our new organization focuses our engineering along four key initiatives: Windows Experience, Internet Explorer, Search, and the Live Experience.  First, we will align projects, teams, and resources to better and more effectively deliver end-to-end customer experiences.  Second, we are organizing in a way that reduces management overhead and hierarchy in the right places and emphasizes the role of our core technical competencies.   Reporting to me, we will have general management where we need the disciplines to come together with business leadership and we will have discipline management where we want to bring together the most senior functional leaders for each discipline and assure the most visibility to each engineering perspective.  Each direct report and each person on the team is responsible for making sure our software is competitive, our engineering process is agile, and our software represents high-impact, must-have innovations. Windows Experience.  The Windows Experience will be led by an engineering team of three direct reports. Ales Holecek will lead development.  Ales, as the leader of development, is responsible for our engineering, architecture plan and execution and is accountable for assuring our code assets and healthy, modern, secure, reliable, and performant.  Julie Larson-Green will lead program management, planning, design, usability, user assistance, and business development.  Julie, as the leader of program management, coordinates the vision process and planning and is accountable for our work plan for SP1 and future releases.  Grant George will lead testing.  Grant, as the leader of test, is responsible for our commitment to quality and validating that our work meets the standards set by customers and our own expectations.  The leaders of the Windows Experience will each work with the leaders in COSD at every step and, in particular, will lead the coordination of planning releases of Windows client going forward.  Together this team will organize around the principles and initiatives outlined in the enclosed memo. Live Experience.  The Live Experience team will be led by an engineering team of three direct reports.  Steve Liffick will lead development.  Steve, as leader of development is responsible for our engineering, architecture plan and execution and is accountable for assuring that our services are scalable, secure, cost-effective, reliable, and fast services.  Chris Jones will lead program management, planning, design, usability, user assistance, and business development.  Chris, as the leader of program management, coordinates the vision process and planning and is accountable for the next wave of Live Services which will include both browser-based services and our Windows applications that connect to these services.  Arthur De Haan will lead testing.  Arthur, as leader of test, is responsible for our commitment to operational quality and scale, validating that our work meets the standards of cost, quality, and completeness the services business require.  The leaders of the Live Experience team will each work with the leaders of Blake Irving’s Windows Live Platform team to deliver the world’s best loosely-coupled combination of platform and services.  Together this team will organize around the principles and initiatives outlined in the enclosed memo. Both the Windows Experience and Live Experience teams have more organization to work do.  The enclosed memo details the planning focus areas for each team.  Over the next 4-6 weeks each of these reports will be announcing the team structure and leaders.  This time will allow us to do the best job at including all viewpoints and perspectives in the team structure and make sure we have the best organization going forward.   This will mean some management changes remain.  Internet Explorer.  The Internet Explorer team will be led by Dean Hachamovitch as it is currently structured.  As the leader of the team, Dean is accountable for delivering the industry’s leading Windows browsing experience for end-users, developers, and our enterprise customers.  With our new organization, there will be a renewed focus on the platform capabilities of Internet Explorer as they relate to integrating third party service connections.  Dean will also lead the partnership with Developer Division with respect to the runtime and development tools that use the Internet Explorer platform.  Dean is accountable for delivery of browsing for all of the Windows platforms and for delivering the right set of features to best enable services integration. Search.  The Search team will continue to be led by Christopher Payne as it is currently structured.  Christopher has built the team from scratch to a credible and growing position.  The work on relevancy and corpus, and innovations around the user experience and local search all form a strong platform to build upon.  We are just coming on line with our advertising support through the partnership with the Windows Live Platform.   Christopher is accountable for search relevancy, experience, and monetization. Live Labs.  Gary Flake will continue to lead Live Labs.  Gary will personally continue to be a key strategic contributor to our overall online services strategy. Today, you will hear from each of our new leaders with follow-up mail.  Starting Friday there will be various forums announced where you can meet them, ask questions, and begin the discussions of how we will together make this transition. We have a few tasks ahead of us which will take priority.  First we will be shipping Vista.  Chris Jones will continue in his responsibilities for shipping Vista.  If you think Chris can help you to ship Vista then by all means ask him.  Dean Hachamovitch will also continue to focus on the Vista browser.  Second, we will be shipping Office 2007 and Grant George will have some responsibilities through the next few months.  Third, we will be releasing Live services through the fall.  Steve Liffick will continue with his existing responsibilities for Live services through their release.  We will also begin planning Vista SP1 and how we will structure the next release of Windows.  SP1 is going to be critically important for the acceptance of Vista as customers expect a level of servicing from us that speeds deployment, but does not introduce changes that might result in resetting evaluations.  Julie will be leading the efforts working with Windows Sustaining Engineering to determine the current workload for SP1 and the requirements due to the Longhorn Server release.  We will be doing everything we can to craft a hardcore SP1 that meets the needs of our enterprise customers and the marketplace and the needs of Server, without adding features that will slow development or make it impossible to complete with the Server release, which itself is date driven.  SP1 will be very focused and tightly controlled. It is worth adding two points of housekeeping.  First, it is has been suggested that we need to have fewer people working on our projects.  We will have fewer people working on our projects by being more effective at managing our resources, more effective at up front planning, and not just having priorities but executing against those priorities.  If we do those things then we can be more efficient and effective with the people we have, each working on clearer and more focused projects.  Our bet is that we can be better at building more software and thus use our scale to an advantage.  Our competitors are hiring more aggressively than ever before and have more people working on services than we do—and we will rebalance our portfolio to reflect that opportunity and continue aggressively hiring only the very best of the best.  Second, we are in the midst of performance management season.  None of the changes here impact the review process; your manager today will continue to be responsible for your review.  In terms of establishing commitments for the next year, we will take advantage of the new system and update these over the course of the year as our plans are locked.  Over the next 4-6 weeks all headtrax changes will be completed. I wanted to invite those interested to open q&a sessions on Friday.  Please join me at either: •	1:00 to 2:30 B 33 Hood •	3:00 to 4:30 Red West E – Emerald room In addition, there will be office hours and other sessions with the new leaders as indicated in their follow-up email. With this structure in place we begin the next wave of software and services for customers around the world.  I’ve been asked many times “How will we win?”  We’re here to deliver innovative software to the market and to have a huge impact on the work and home lives of customers around the world—winning signifies an end, and for me we are starting on a journey as infinite as the possibilities of software.  Together as a team we will take big steps, do spectacularly well for Microsoft and shareholders, have a great time, and most of all we will change the world with our efforts.    --Steven Sinofsky To add a postscript, at the transition in March a commitment was made to being transparent in how our team is managed.  By sharing a memo of this detail broadly you are experiencing this transparency.  In return, please commit to maintaining every element of this communication within the bounds of Microsoft confidentiality at all times.
The full mail announcing the new organization. This mail was sent to the thousands of engineers across the team, but also to over 150 Vice Presidents and their direct reports. The latter was an attempt to send the message that we were making changes and not to worry. This was incredibly stressful mail to send. Click to enlarge. (Source: One Strategy materials)

On the last Thursday in June 2006 (breaking with the tradition of Friday afternoon reorg mails), I sent out a 3-page email with an attached 20-page memo (with no org chart or diagram, and no to-be-hired spots). At more than 13,000 words the memo was titled “Windows and Windows Live: Organizing for agility, Competing with focus, Building must-have software.”

This post is for paid subscribers

Already a paid subscriber? Sign in
© 2022 Steven Sinofsky, All Rights Reserved
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Publish on Substack Get the app
Substack is the home for great writing