Most Important Skills For A Senior Technical Program Manager At Microsoft
Kartik, a Senior Technical Program Manager at Microsoft, emphasizes the importance of "incentive alignment"—understanding the goals and motivations of all stakeholders (including themselves, partners, and vendors) to find overlapping work that contributes to the overall project and corporate objectives. This skill, Kartik suggests, is crucial for efficiency and could have saved significant time and effort earlier in their career.
Project Management, Communication, Teamwork, Incentive Alignment, Leadership
Advizer Information
Name
Job Title
Company
Undergrad
Grad Programs
Majors
Industries
Job Functions
Traits
Kartik Atyam
Senior Technical Program Manager
Microsoft
UCLA
UC Berkeley
Engineering - Civil
Architecture, Construction & Design, Technology
Real Estate
Scholarship Recipient, Took Out Loans, Worked 20+ Hours in School, First Generation College Student
Video Highlights
1. Incentive Alignment: Understanding and aligning the goals of yourself, partners, and vendors is crucial for success.
2. Collaboration and Communication: Working effectively with diverse teams is paramount.
3. Strategic Planning: Identifying work that aligns individual and corporate goals to maximize efficiency and avoid unnecessary tasks.
Transcript
What skills are most important for a job like yours?
At this point in my career, I think it's really important to understand how to best work with people. The part about that that's most important that I've found value out of is incentive alignment.
That means understanding what's important to me, what my stated and explicit goals are, what's important to my partners, and what's important to my vendors. It also means understanding how they're being rewarded for the work they do.
If I can find the pieces of work that are in alignment with all of those and tie that into what our overall corporate, company, or project goal is, that's where I find success. I think that if I had a better understanding of this earlier in my career, it could have been very helpful to cut out a lot of unnecessary work early on.