Moving on with life, literally
September 21st will be my first work-day with my new employer. Not here, in Austria, where I grew up, but at the other end of the world, in Seattle, Washington, United States. I’ve been hired by Microsoft straight out of my internship last summer and they offered me a pretty nice deal. Not only in terms of compensation, which is commonly known to be, let’s say, worth a move around the world, but mainly because of the job that I’ll be working on. I am about to be a Product Planner for Office, in particular for the Outlook/Exchange branch of Office, the enterprise/business segment of Office, so to say.
What does a Product Planer do?
Well, basically it’s comparable to inbound-marketing, which, in itself is a very strange term. I’ll be tuning in to what people are feeling about a product, what they are complaining about, what they see in it for the future and what I’ll be expecting to turn into a trend in the near future. I’ll ask them in focus groups, via surveys and all other kinds of qualitative and quantitative research methods available. It involves travelling, communicating with -a lot- of people and allows me to more or less influence the future of a product by handing my findings, suggestions and research over to the product manager. Usually, there’s about 1-2 Product Planers per product, so this is a huge opportunity to make an impact. Waking up, knowing that about 500 million people will use the product that I am planning for in their daily life feels very odd. A lot of people asked me about this, so I hope this serves as a basic explanation for now.
Will I be gone forever?
Hopefully not. I think it’s about the right time, more or less, to do this now. Five years in the future, I will be to tied up with things that would render me unable to move globally. I am in no relationship and I don’t plan do be in one within the next year or two, this is certainly something that allows me to do this in the first place. I wish I could move on to New York in a year or two, or return back to Austria and start all over with what I have left behind. Given that I can establish myself in the US, similar to what happend in Austria now, I would consider a longer stay. But the masses are just huge, it’ll be incredibly hard to make myself heard. One thing for sure, I’ll be updating this tumblr with all the important things happening along my way, as this will be the main opportunity for you to follow my tracks.
