(Originally published on June 15, 2022 by Microsoft 365 Insider Engagement Team)
Remaining curious
Rolly Seth grew up in India and studied engineering, but the traditional role of a software engineer didn’t turn out to be the best fit for her curious mind.
“I graduated in 2009 with an engineering degree, and I started out working in a research organization as a scientist fellow,” she said. “There I was exposed to different things, like creative arts and technology, and learned about bringing everything together in a multidisciplinary way, which made me reconsider a strictly engineering-focused career.”
During this time, Rolly also was accepted into the first iteration of the Young India Fellowship program and began working with Microsoft technologies. As part of these efforts, she and her team created a device for the visually impaired that attracted a lot of attention. Shortly after completing the program, she was recruited by Microsoft in 2012.
“I applied for engineering jobs at Microsoft, but after interviewing, they told me they were looking for people with multidisciplinary skills for PM roles. So, I switched to that,” she recalled. “I was kind of shocked, but in a positive way—it really empowered me to build a career using all my skills.”
After working for several years at Microsoft India, Rolly eventually moved to the United States and put her creativity to the test by joining the team at Microsoft Garage, an incubation program devoted to collaboration and innovation. After four years there, she switched to Office, where she currently works as a Senior Product Manager on the Graphics & Video team.
We recently spoke to Rolly about applying her inherent curiosity to the development of new Office products and features, the future of presentations and video in PowerPoint, and how discussions with passionate Office Insiders have benefited her work.
You have a YouTube channel called Always Be Curious. Can you tell us what it’s about?
Rolly: My YouTube channel came out of a side project I did a few years ago called “52 Weekends of Making.” One of the main reasons I moved to the United States was to learn. So, every weekend I would travel across the Pacific Northwest to learn traditional arts and crafts and explore how technology can be applied to these areas. I just reached out to different creative people in Seattle, Portland, and other areas, trying to figure out what I could bring back to Microsoft technology. No one asked me to do it. I’m just interested in lots of things, like glassblowing, welding, and ceramics. Every weekend, I tried a new one. It was really fun.
I created the YouTube channel so I could have a place to keep a record of all of the information I had learned, as well as a means of sharing it with others. It’s a great way to spread the spirit of continuous learning.
My current personal project is to do 300 days of virtual production—essentially, working with the next generation of digital tools to take storytelling to the next level. So, every day I’m trying to learn something new about virtual production. Again, there’s no mission to teach anyone; it's more about just being open to learning and invoking more curiosity in people.
Can you talk about some of the coolest features you’ve worked on during your time with Office?
There have been a few. Currently, I’m most excited about my work in the video space. The pandemic has made video a priority, because it helps connect people who may be working remotely or in a hybrid model. The question is, how does Office catch up to this trend toward remote work and provide a great video experience?
So, we created a special incubation team focused on prototyping and delivering a world-class video experience in Office products, starting with PowerPoint. In this work, I collaborate with people not just in Redmond, but also in India, Prague, and China. It’s become a central pillar of Office.
As for a specific cool feature: cameo is the one that comes to mind. After about a year of development, this feature is now broadly available, and customers seem really excited about it.
What do you see as the future of PowerPoint and presentations over, say, the next five years?
One of our top priorities is ensuring that customers can have engaging collaborations in a hybrid world, and also when communicating asynchronously. As we roll out the cameo feature more broadly, we’re getting a lot of interesting feedback. For example, customers are wondering: What happens if I want to be part of the meeting and engage in the chat but not do a live presentation, and rely on the recorded cameo to deliver the content? That's one aspect of the hybrid experience we are trying to account for.
Another area of focus is immersivity—not just in presentations, but across Office. Currently, most presentations are thought of as presenter-driven, which is true if you're in a live meeting in the conference room. But what if your audience is global, or people are choosing to work remotely and not be physically present? In those cases, we believe that attendee-side personalization is needed too. For example, an attendee may want to see a given presentation in Hebrew, even though the presenter recorded it in English. So we’ve been exploring that as well.
How do Office Insiders help you in your work?
Insiders have been very helpful, especially for the cameo feature. They were able to provide great early feedback that I wasn’t able to get elsewhere, because they know their field and they are always willing to chat. After the Insiders blog post about cameo appeared, I was in touch with so many people on LinkedIn. We had Insiders even recording videos and saying, “Hey, we are still facing flickers,” or bringing up issues around neurodiversity, or asking for a Mac version. (For that last one, I was able to tell them that we’re working on it, and it’s now been released on the Mac for the Insiders audience.)
The time period between releasing to Insiders and releasing to the broad Production audience is extremely critical. The Insiders are very vocal, but they've been very positive and willing to help. I've even had one-on-one chats with some of them, and I’ve learned things from them. For example, cameo doesn't support virtual cameras, but one of the Insiders reached out and said, “I found a hack, and the feature does support it.”
I feel like many of them know more than me—some of them have been using PowerPoint for more than 30 years now, for example. When we recently celebrated 35 years of PowerPoint, I read your post about it and I was thinking, “I can learn a lot from these people.”
What are some books or movies that inspire you?
I've shared a list of all the books I'll be reading this year on my YouTube channel. The overall theme is motivation and inspiration; it’s about living a better life and helping others.
I've even told people in my YouTube post that if anyone wants one of the books after I read it, I'm happy to send it to them for free. Because part of my mission in life is not just to do my own stuff and learn, but also to encourage people to be more curious. And this was one simple way to do that.
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