Hey Ryen! What’s it like to work in the Identity Division at Microsoft?

[Alex Simons (AZURE)]

First published on CloudBlogs on Sep, 08 2015
Howdy folks! I received a lot of positive feedback and questions a few weeks back after Jasmine Perez's blog post about her experience working as a summer intern here in our team. Given that, I thought it would be cool to have another team member do similar blog post. This time I've asked Ryen Macabbad to write about her experience working in the Identity team. Ryen is an Army veteran who joined us just over a year ago through the Microsoft Software and Systems Academy program . She works as a Program Manager in our Customer and Partner Success team focusing on helping customer get up and running with Azure AD Premium and driving improvements to our products and services based on what she learns from those customers. If you'd be interested in joining us here in Microsoft's Identity Division doing a job like Ryen's (or as a developer or a feature focused program manager) we'd love to hear from you. We're growing the team a lot this year, so there are a lot of opportunities available. To check them out and see if there's one that might be a good fit for you, head on over to https://careers.microsoft.com/ and search for "#identityjob". Best regards, Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons ) Director of Program Management Microsoft Identity Division ----------------------- Hey there!  My name is Ryen Macababbad and I'm on the Customer Success Team in the Azure Active Directory product group. Alex asked me to write a blog on 'A day in the life of…' well, one of the most amazing jobs ever! I guess we call ourselves "Customer Success Program Managers" but in my head it's more like "Dream Team."  Regardless of our title, what we are, is customer-centric, and that's a pretty awesome thing. So, what exactly do we do, and why is it important? Well, in a nutshell, we get to work with organizations that purchase the Enterprise Mobility Suite or Azure AD Premium standalone to help them implement Azure AD Premium features. Working side by side with customers, we learn not only what is driving the organization to use our product, but we also get a sense for how the technical requirements differ from customer to customer.  What we do, it changes how things are developed. We get to deliver solutions to customers that really fits in well with their business needs, and as Satya Nadella, our CEO says, "Empower others to achieve more." Now, there's really no such thing as a 'typical' day as a Customer Success Program Manager. My favorite days are filled with digging in deep with an organization's IT staff to identify any issues and provide solutions.  I get to share my knowledge and experience with them, and in the process I also get to learn from them.  There's no way to know everything, although I wish there was! So I always learn something new from the customers I work with, whether it's how they are implementing and using our solutions, or how they educate their end users in the new technologies they introduce to their infrastructure. Our engagement with customers has led to, or sped up, the development of some pretty neat stuff, like Password Reset with Account unlock , " Bring Your Own App ", localization for the QA gate for SSPR, and even some of those neat little 'toast' notifications you might have seen pop up in your management portal, letting you know something has changed or something requires your attention.  Check out these examples:

The coolest thing I learn from customers though, is their vision. By building a relationship with our customers, I am granted the opportunity to see their vision for the future; and the nature of my position affords me the ability to influence change and growth in engineering to meet the requirements making that vision a reality. How cool is that?! I can't tell you how awesome it feels to be able to contribute to that process. I get to be a part of something BIG, that's only going to get BIGGER and BETTER! It gives me goosebumps! Another aspect of my role that I enjoy, is delivering webinars. If you're new to the Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) or Azure Active Directory Premium (Azure AD Premium) then you may have received an email inviting you to view one of our free instructional webinars. Or maybe you saw that there are some really cool webinars popping up on Azure . Some of those are us!  More are coming all the time, so keep checking to see what's new.  My team's webinars are live sessions where you can ask us questions and get answers in real-time, so if you end up in one of mine, be sure to say hello! Yet another aspect of our role is helping to train our Partners and the Microsoft Onboarding Centers , globally, so that even more people are trained and proficient in answering questions and walking customers through different Azure AD Premium scenarios, and in the future, Azure Rights Management scenarios as well!  This is such an exciting space to be in, it's growing so fast, and like a fine wine, it's only going to get better with age. Here are a few of us on one of our training trips at an Onboarding Center.

All in all, we can never get bored because there is always something new to learn, something new to share, or a new customer scenario to understand.  This is all part of our Microsoft culture to obsess about customers.  The most important thing to our team is to understand the needs and requirements of the organizations from their point of view. This allows us to provide customers with best practices based on our experiences, as well as provide detailed input to our engineers to help make the products and services we offer even better – for both the organizations and the end-users! Thanks for your time! Ryen (Twitter: @Ryen_Mac )