Beyond the Org Chart: A Redmond Story
Building 34 is its own kind of beast on a Tuesday. The air hums with the quiet intensity of a thousand keyboards, the scent of espresso from the micro-kitchen, and the unspoken pressure of the next earnings call. As an executive here, your calendar isn't a schedule; it's a game of Tetris, and you're always three blocks behind. My days are a blur of strategy reviews, product roadmaps, and forecast meetings. I live in Outlook and Teams, my world neatly segmented into 30-minute blocks. In this sea of blue-light and ambition, you learn to read people quickly. You spot the talent, the climbers, the coasters. And then there was Maya. Maya wasn't just "a girl in the office." She was an executive on a parallel track, managing the Azure data services portfolio while I handled the developer tools side. To say she was sharp is an understatement. She was the one in the Senior Leadership Team meetings who asked the one question nobody had prepared for. She could dismantle ...