Microsoft executive Julie Larson-Green’s shift to the company’s Applications & Services Group is part of a broader series of leadership changes announced this week for the division that includes Microsoft Office, Bing, Skype and other well-known apps and online services.
Qi Lu, the executive vice president who leads “ASG,” as it’s known, sent out a memo to employees Monday afternoon outlining the new structure of the group and naming the leadership team.
This is one of the final pieces to fall into place following the company’s “One Microsoft” reorganization announcement last year. New Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella appears to be forging ahead with that plan.
ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley has more on the changes in the division, which she describes as one of Microsoft’s “biggest and most mysterious groups.”
Here’s the memo in full, as obtained by GeekWire. (We haven’t yet gotten our hands on the “Mission and Strategy Framing” memo referenced in the beginning, but we hear a version was issued as a content-protected e-book with an intro by Bill Gates.)
From: Qi Lu
Sent: Monday, February 24, 2014 3:01 PM
Subject: ASG Organizational AnnouncementHi Everyone,
Further to the ASG Mission and Strategy Framing memo launch email, laying out our path forward, it is important for ASG to have the right organizational configuration and structure that will enable us to lead this transformation, and to deliver differentiation with a sense of urgency. Accordingly, the changes to our organizational structure and leadership teams, are outlined below.
The ASG Organization will be composed of the following teams:
- My Life & Work
- Information Platform
- Bing Experiences
- Advertising & Consumer Monetization
- Information & Content Consumption Experiences
- Skype & Lync
- Office Client Services
- Office Server Services
- MBS (Dotted)
The My Life & Work org will be led by Julie Larson-Green, reporting to me directly, as our ASG Chief Experience Officer (CXO). The CXO will be responsible for developing the Digital Life & Digital Work Experience Substrate, shared user experience, initial hero scenarios, and roadmap to onboard existing products and services. The CXO will also have ASG-wide responsibility for strengthening the customer experience across our ASG product & service portfolio by leading our culture shift to modern experiences, increasing our expertise in and muscle for design excellence and impact, establishing quality standards, and ensuring shared plans are in place to address systemic experience barriers – from device through service.
Julie will continue as the EVP for the Devices and Studios (DnS) org until end of March, and will then transition to ASG. In her current EVP role, Julie oversees all hardware development for the company including Xbox, Surface, and accessories; as well as Microsoft Studios, which covers all games, entertainment and premium content experiences for all devices across the company. With over 21 years at Microsoft, Julie has led large engineering teams and driven the definition of products and customer experiences that touch more than a billion people across developer tools, Internet Explorer, Office, and Windows. Julie brings the breadth of leadership from program management, design, research, development and testing, necessary for the CXO role, and I cannot be more pleased and honored to have Julie as our new CXO.
The Information Platform org, led by David Ku, will be responsible for the following:
- Web (of the world) Information Fabric (Satori as platform)
- Web (of documents) Index and serving
- Core Intent, Relevance, and User Understanding
- Search Ads Platform and Marketplace
- NUI and CU capabilities
Additionally, this group will be responsible for ASG shared platforms and services, with specific focus on:
- Shared Cloud Technologies (Edge, XAP, ObjectStore, among others)
- Shared Data, Analytics and Experimentation Platform
- Shared Engineering Fundamentals tools and services
- Shared Privacy, Security and Compliance
- The teams in STC-China (Asia)
- Continue to partner closely with MSV (Microsoft Silicon Valley) and STC-India teams on platform initiatives
The Bing Experiences org, led by Derrick Connell, will be repsonsible for the following groups:
- Design, Research and Editorial
- Quality of our Customer Experience (aka Test)
- Bing.com homepage and SERP (including UX experience, UX Platform and UX Composition)
- Bing Verticals: Maps, Local, Geospatial, News (dotted line) and Multi-Media
- Bing powered device shells such as Windows Threshold, Cortana and Bingbox
- Bing powered service experiences such as Office Insights, Agave, Skype and Outlook integration
- 3rd party Experiences with key partners such as Apple, Facebook and Amazon
- The teams in STC-India and MSV (Microsoft Silicon Valley)
The Advertising & Consumer Monetization org, led by Rik van der Kooi, will be responsbile for the following groups:
- Display Advertising Engineering
- Display Advertising Business
- Search Advertising Business
- Marketing Solutions
- Holistic Monetization
- Subscriptions
The Information & Content Consumption Experiences org, led by Brian MacDonald, will be responsible for the following groups:
- MSN
- Bing Apps
- Current set of segments
- Content publishing and ingestion tools and platforms
In addition, we will create a new central group for ASG “Future Do More” Experiences, under Brian, that will work on a set of future scenarios and incubate key innovations
The following CVP’s will transition from their current roles to report to the respective new leaders:
- Andrew Shuman will report to Julie Larson-Green
- Zig Serafin will report to Gurdeep Singh Pall
- Gaurav Sareen will report to David Ku
Lastly, we are also pleased to recognize the great accomplishments of the following leaders, and to congratulate them on their promotions to Corporate Vice Presidents:
Adam Pisoni: Adam joined Microsoft in 2012 as part of the Yammer acquisition, where he was co-founder and CTO. Since joining Microsoft, he has provided clear vision in both product and engineering, and has helped establish Yammer as a cloud on-ramp and differentiator for Office 365. His vision for how modern organizations must “work like a network” is influencing customers and Microsoft alike. Adam fosters a team culture of commitment and passion for customer impact.
Mark Walker: As Distinguished Engineer and Development leader for SharePoint, Mark has led the work to move the code base to the cloud in Office 365, architecting for rapid growth in scale. His team has driven both product and culture transition to cloud first, making the needed bold bets while managing customer expectations for critical business continuity. Mark has deep technical insight and judgment, and is known as a collaborator and developer of teams.
Harvinder (Harv) Bhela: As director of PM in Exchange, Harv has been a key leader in the evolution of the product through the rise of mobile and its transition to the cloud with Exchange Online as a foundation for Office 365. He has recently taken a lead role in bringing in Outlook.com and is focusing on an integrated strategy for all communication endpoints. Harv builds teams that drive both strategy and disciplined execution. His passion spans building scalable cloud infrastructure, design and end-user experience.
Neelamadhaba (Neel) Mahapatro: Neel’s cloud engineering impact has spanned Microsoft Account (scaling to hundreds of millions of accounts), Exchange Online and now Office 365 Information Protection, where he is a Distinguished Engineer. In his current role he has rewritten and modernized the service stack, enabling massive scale with high availability, and has driven differentiating compliance capability. Neel balances deep hands-on technical impact with strong team leadership.
Darryn Dieken: Darryn is the PM leader for Bing Platform and Capacity engineering, and he also manages our search partnerships with Yahoo! and Apple. He has led complex efforts such as AutoPilot and Cosmos through huge growth in scale, then worked to transition these platforms to C+E, as foundations of Microsoft’s services infrastructure. Darryn is a collaborative leader who works across teams to drive complex programs, thinking holistically across technology, process and business. He will assume an expanded role in the ASG Platform team going forward.
The rest of the ASG org and my leadership team remains the same …
Please join me in welcoming the new leaders, congratulating the new CVP’s, and thanking all the CVP’s moving on to new leaders.
We are at the start of a multi-year journey that will require everyone in ASG and Microsoft to take big, bold steps towards “changing the world” again, which requires working together as “One Microsoft” and driving cross-company alignment and strong execution across all groups. With this new org, I am confident we are closer to that vision going forward.
I am counting on your leadership and support to help during this transition.
Let’s go!
Thanks.
-Qi
