Director, Commercial Cloud and Business Planning Insights, Microsoft Research + Insights 

That’s an easy one. It’s the teamwork aspect for sure. I’m constantly impressed by the power of bringing a broad set of talented folks together to solve a problem. 

Our business spans a wide set of technologies, products and services that address the needs of consumers, software developers, IT professionals, business decision makers and end users from all over the world. On an average day, I have a number of people within the team I manage who can share data, deliver insight or can find the most recent point of view we need to address the issue we are tasked to solve, and they work well together to do just that. 

What makes it even richer is that we also have access to people across our entire Research + Insights organization who can contribute content, reshape our thinking or even push an alternative perspective that up-levels the insights we create. Being able to leverage the deep insights of a marketing scientist on one team who has been here well over a decade and pair that with fresh ideas and a different understanding of the problem from a research manager early in their career simply brings better answers for our stakeholders. Having access to data that has a consumer’s perspective on a product and using that knowledge to better understand how we might improve things on the business-to-business side makes deeper insight and better impact for our company. It’s really rewarding to be a small part of that day in and day out.

Do you have any tips for client-side insight professionals looking to develop strategic partnerships with internal stakeholders? 

Three things come to mind when I think about building and nurturing stakeholder partnerships:

As insights professionals it is critical that we listen well and understand the strategic business questions that need to be solved. It’s equally i...