On new years day of 2015, I got an email from a Microsoft recruiter to schedule a phone screen for Microsoft’s Finance Rotation Program (FRP). A week after the phone screen, I was reading the book The Alchemist during a study break and started to think about my personal legend. I thought Microsoft would be a good opportunity and hoped for another interview. That’s right when my phone rang, it was the recruiter informing me that I was about to be chosen for the final super day in February. The weekend before the big interview in Redmond, my brother got me tickets to see the Oklahoma City Thunder take on the LA Clippers, a present for my 21st birthday. I told him I couldn’t go, because I needed time to prepare for the biggest interview of my life. Laughing, he said I had nothing to worry about, I would get the job, and we can use this weekend to celebrate the new job. His confidence in me, and the uncanny coincidence with the Alchemist book, were the “omens I’d follow” into my own personal legend. Thankfully the interview went well, I got the offer, and the rest is history.
The Finance Rotation Program at Microsoft is a two year program where recent college graduates complete four rotations across various groups in finance, each lasting six months. It’s a great opportunity to learn about different parts of Microsoft’s business, while also being a world class “try it before you buy it” experience for finding your optimal career path. You get to find what your destined to do, and Microsoft gets a well rounded finance professional that is tuned to find the exact job they want long term. A true win-win.
I often get asked to talk about my experience from would be FRP’s still in school and existing FRP’s in the program. My career path in the FRP is nontraditional in nature, but is hopefully one anyone with enough high agency can do as well. I write this to those high agency folks. People who want to do interesting things in the world and help others. What follows is my path in the FRP and what I recommend for today’s FRP’s.
Rotations
Internship: Venture Integration
I came into the FRP as an intern in the summer of 2015, the same summer Microsoft launched Windows 10. It was a fun time to join finance at Microsoft. Satya Nadella was only installed as CEO a few years back, same as Amy Hood the CFO. The stock price was in the 40s and no one thought Microsoft was doing anything cool or exciting. Safe to say most students at my college had MacBooks instead of Surfaces.
The Venture Integration team was responsible for helping acquired companies integrate successfully into Microsoft. While Corporate Development teams work on closing the deal, the Venture Integration team does everything else. From doing due diligence on the companies financial statements, digging through the products source code, all the way to determining if the acquired CEO would move to Redmond. It was a cool space to be in. Code names were used for each deal, and the deal flow was strong. Often we started a new deal every two weeks.
My role on the team didn’t involve running deals, although I did get to help with modeling the integration costs for one deal. I was tasked with running the quarterly scorecard process. This involved a lot of cat herding. For each recently closed deal, I would track down metrics to see if we were on track for a successful integration into Microsoft. This was more project management and less about financial modeling or analysis. The cool part was on the last day of my internship I completed the scorecard powerpoint and personally sent it to the CFO for review, who would then share it with the board of directors. So, in a way, I got to work on something that Bill Gate’s got to see. Most likely it was buried in the appendix of the board materials but I know my guy Bill loves to read! So I’m sure he saw it and was blown away by my excellence. At least that’s what I tell myself.
The life changing moment for me happened towards the end of the summer. The tech team responsible for reviewing the code of acquired companies hosted a brown bag lunch session about a new service called “Azure Machine Learning Studio”. They demoed a drag and drop tool that could build a machine learning model to predict if an event was going to happen or not. With a few clicks of their mouse they had a working model up and running in a self-serve UI. Only a few lines of code were written, with most of the magic happening in predefined lego blocks they pieced together. My mind was blown. It seemed like a magic trick to me, and I had to figure out how they did it. In school I always loved building three statement financial models to value a companies stock price. The biggest assumption we had to make was around future revenue growth, and that number was always made up. You could say xyz company’s revenue will continue to grow 10% because of xyz reason, but in the end it was a guess. The fact that you could build a machine learning model to create a more accurate prediction of the future was astounding to me, and I had to learn more.
Within a week after that presentation, all of the FRP interns got to meet with the CFO. A lot of questions were asked. I’m not even sure who asked it but a question around AI was brought up. Amy said that AI and machine learning will become very important in finance one day, and it will be an important skill for everyone to know. There are few moments of pure clarity in a lifetime where everything comes together and makes perfect sense. This was one of those moments for me. I had to figure out this AI thing. I had absolutely no clue how to start. I was only a finance major with zero technical skills. What I lacked in hard skills I made up for with enthusiasm to go figure it out any way possible.
The internship ended and thankfully I got the return offer. I remember the head of the FRP looking at my manager during the final review meeting. She said, “should you tell him or should I tell him”. My heart dropped, I thought I messed up and wasn’t getting the offer. Thankfully that confusion was cleared up real fast and I had a return offer in my hand. How can I say no to an opportunity to come back to Microsoft? Within a week back at school I accepted the offer and had total peace of mind going into my final year of undergrad.
First Rotation: Windows COGS
My first rotation was a classic rhythm of business (ROB) rotation in the world of Windows, Microsoft’s oldest business. It was a great place to earn my sea legs in traditional FP&A work. I was responsible for owning the royalty portfolio for “codec” payments. Basically there is special software needed to read/write disks that are inserted into an optical drive on a computer. That software comes from companies like Dolbe, and Microsoft had to pay them to license the software on Windows OS. Wow, that makes me sound old. Working on royalties for optical drives on computers. Safe to say no one even thinks about optical drives anymore.
It wasn’t the prettiest work, but it helped me learn the basics of closing the books each month and forecasting the future each quarter. I had to submit journal entries and make manual adjustments to our payments when needed. Once you got the hang of pulling the data and making journal entries, the work wasn’t all that hard. So most of my time toward the end of the rotation was spent trying to automate every single part of the ROB process. What was initially a complex refresh process handed to me at the start of my rotation was transformed into a simple click to refresh excel that did all of the heavy lifting for you. It was my pride and joy.
My manager gave me a powerful piece of feedback towards the end of the rotation. He said that I liked building things. Some people like to start things, others like to keep a process going or optimize it. I was someone who liked to build new things. That idea stuck with me. I eventually became the guy on the team who could build any complex workflow as a model in excel. For example building out the new forecast consolidation file that all team members could add their component forecasts into. While it was fun to build this kind of stuff, it wasn’t AI work. For that I had to continue on my data hero’s journey.
Second Rotation: Worldwide Commercial Solutions Finance
For my second rotation I wanted to leave the world of ROB behind and get my hands dirty with data. I went to a team that did two things. First was analytics around discounts and customer renewals across Microsoft’s commercial business, and the second was around supporting the financing of customer purchases. Back in the day a customer could finance a large software purchase so they didn’t have to pay for most of it up front. We would partner with a bank to finance the payment or even do the financing ourselves through our Treasury department.
This rotation was all around analytics, which was exactly what I needed. I was able to analyze patterns around the type of discounts we give to customers, and how those discounts compound as a customer continues to renew their software purchase contracts. Another big ticket analytics item was around tracking special azure financing deals. This was a key metric we reported directly to the CFO, so a lot of eye balls were on it. I was the guy to track down this data and create interesting ways to understand it.
Power BI was recently released. No one on the team knew how to use it, but understood how powerful it could be when visualizing data. So I became the Power BI guy on the team. The one to figure out how to use it, then teach it to everyone else. Thankfully the previous FRP started them on the Power BI journey by building some initial dashboards. My job was to improve those dashboards, then get everyone else up to speed on how they could build their own. It was a solid experience in the world of analytics. One where no one could show you how to solve certain problems. You were on your own and had to figure everything out yourself.
The analytics experience was great, but still no AI. While on the team I tried to find ways we could apply AI and machine learning to specific areas but couldn’t find a good opportunity. At this point I started to learn more on my own through books and courses on the internet. I was flying blind, with no one to guide me to ensure I was headed in the right direction. That’s when the power of serendipity came and altered the course of my FRP career.
Another FRP analyst in my class got her last pick on her list of ranked rotations. Like choice number 32 out of 32 options. Right before she started on her team for the second rotation, there was a large re-org and she was able to now chose wherever she’d like to go in the broader org. A true choose your own adventure. She had an information systems background and found a team that was just starting to get into the world of machine learning. I heard about this and knew exactly where I wanted to go for my third rotation.
Third Rotation: Finance Business Intelligence Services
Working for the FBI, what a fun thing to say. The FBI Services team was almost an in house consultancy team, who supported most folks in finance. If someone wanted a special dashboard, custom tool, or even machine learning model they could reach out to this team and get the help they needed. The team consisted mostly of program manager (PM) type roles for full time employees, and various technical roles for vendors.
Coming to this team was being at the right place at the right time. In the summer of 2015 (during my internship) our CFO reached out to the head of the cloud engineering team, asking him to help get some initial machine learning solutions off the ground. Eventually this work was transferred to the FBI Services team, who hired a team of data science vendors to keep the work going. Most of the ML solutions centered around time series forecasting, since that is easily the biggest bang for buck ML work in the corporate finance space. Almost everyone under the CFO is responsible for some sort of forecast, so the impact with ML is enormous.
I came on the team as a PM who would partner with the data science vendors to build ML solutions. It was a dream come true. Finally I had people I can talk to about ML. Pick their brain. See how they think about ML problems. I also found a data science certification offered through Microsoft (on the EdX learning platform). It had a full learning track for python, no coding experience required. Thankfully as a Microsoft employee I could take the courses for free. While on the team I was able to make the learning part of my job, and even devote part of each day to taking the courses. It was a dream come true.
The big project on the team was around creating a centralized tool for our finance teams in the field, teams who support sales and sit all around the world, to use for their quarterly forecast of the commercial business. We were tasked with building a tool that could combine machine learning methods with existing sales pipeline based methods (like taking what’s in the sales pipeline and multiplying it by how many deals we have closed on average historically). One tool that everyone in the field could use instead of building their own manual excel model that eats up weeks of their time every forecast cycle.
It was a fun project to work on. The stakes were high, and no one had done anything like it before. It wasn’t just a machine learning project, but also a centralization and automation project. A crazy ven diagram of categories of technology. Over the course of my six month rotation we (and I say that lightly since I was the rookie on this project) were able to go from initial concept to working plugin in excel that could automatically calculate the forecast for the user, allow them to select what forecast methods they’d like to use, make any manual adjustments, and save that data back to a data cube. A herculean effort that had a few late nights toward the end of the project. It was a fantastic learning experience, with so many different opportunities to learn in one project. How to work with technical and non-technical people. Getting the most from ML models, and knowing their limitations. The change management required to get to people to want to use the new tool and move away from what they’ve always done.
I was also able to knock out the entire Microsoft certification in data science. I could now write python code to analyze data, train models, and create predictions. Everything that astounded me as an intern was now in my tool kit. I had data super powers and it felt awesome. The only problem is I had no idea what came next. Towards the end of the rotation I wanted to stay on the team and graduate early. Unfortunately the previous FRP was able to secure a full time spot on the team before I asked. Now I was in a tough spot. Knowing what I wanted to do, but not knowing where to do it. Thankfully serendipity came to my rescue.
At a FRP manager round table, my manager noted to the group that I was looking for a home for my fourth and final rotation. I wanted to work on machine learning but had no clue what team to rank highly. Another manager spoke up, saying they were just starting to dip their toes in the ML space and could have me on the team. That chance encounter lead me to ranking that rotation as my number one pick. Other FRP’s thought I was crazy. Usually that rotation went to a first year FRP, often as someone’s first rotation. I saw it as an opportunity to work on a technical team and carve out a path to working full time on ML. Safe to say after I joined the team every FRP who has worked on the team since has been a second year analyst.
Fourth Rotation: Office/Dynamics/Bing Business Intelligence
My final rotation was a BI team that supported finance teams in the Office, Dynamics, and Bing product spaces. Previous FRP’s worked on an executive scorecard that would get sent to senior leaders. I had my fill of scorecards while an intern so I was relieved that they were changing the rotation to allow me to work on machine learning problems. I felt like the luckiest guy in the world. I could actually write code to build machine learning models and get paid for it, all without having a degree in the subject.
I worked on two main projects while on the team. One was around forecasting search traffic volume for our Bing business partners, and another was focused on trying to predict if a potential customer purchase in our sales pipeline was going to close or not. The search volume project was exciting because I could write code from scratch to create the forecasts. It was my first true ML project that I was responsible for coding. Building something from nothing, it was exhilarating. Just like my first rotation manager said.
The second project was a tough one. Being able to create a classification model to predict the likelihood of a deal in our customer sales pipeline closing was a tricky project. One where getting high quality historical data was tough to get. I knew this was something analytics teams in sales had to of tried to solve before, so I sent out the bat signal through a few distribution groups and got a hit. A data science team in India had done the exact work I needed and could send me the results of their models prediction. What should have taken months of work was now widdled down to a few weeks to pull the prediction data and display it in a Power BI. Leveraging the work of others proved a powerful lesson for me, and allowed me to finish my project that much faster.
My time on the team flew by and I was quickly approaching the end of my FRP tenure, meaning I needed to find a full time job ASAP. Most of my time quickly shifted to checking internal job boards and emailing managers in other BI teams, hoping they had a spot for me. I wanted this ML train to keep rolling. My current team said that they could potentially offer me a job, but I had to wait a little longer. This did little to remove any fear of not finding a job post FRP graduation. FRP’s were given some flexibility in finding a full time job. After graduating the program in September, Microsoft gave you about 4-6 weeks more to settle into a final job. You would still get paid, even if you didn’t have a team to call home. Being in this corporate limbo sounds nice in theory but in reality is awful. Like your days are numbered.
The waiting ended in a re-org of another BI team joining ours. So there was a hiring freeze in the meantime while both teams were being combined. After that, a job was offered, and the rest is history. I’m still on that team today. We’ve been through a lot of re-orgs since 2018, but I still get to work on ML every single day. I consider myself lucky.
Advice
Here is my advice for anyone interested in the FRP, currently in the program, or FRP’s who are about to graduate and start the next phase of their career. I have to say that this advice may not stand the test of time, hiring practices constantly change. So take these next words with a grain of salt.
Aspiring FRP’s
Recruiting for the FRP used to be done at target schools. Places like Texas, Penn, and the University of Washington. Kids from these schools normally had the best shot at getting an interview, because Microsoft would come onto campus and do interviews. Thankfully this started to change when I applied for the internship. Now Microsoft finds FRPs from any school in the country, even recently expanding to other parts of the world. This opens up the opportunity of joining the FRP to almost anyone in the world, but because of this it becomes harder to get recognized in a sea full of applications.
Before you even apply, you need to put yourself in a strong position by building a portfolio of experiences and skills that make you a perfect match for the FRP. Here is what I recommend.
- High Agency: Having good grades is a fantastic accomplishment, but nowadays everyone has good grades. It becomes more of a check box than something that differentiates yourself from others. Grades show that you can follow instructions, keep deadlines, and demonstrate some type of understanding of your study area. What companies want though are people who go out into the world and make things happen. People who are proactive instead of reactive, or better put have high agency. The best definition I’ve heard of high agency is “a person you would call to bail you out of a third world prison”. Someone who can do that can most likely figure out how to do any kind of job, and become indispensable to their company. The best way to showcase high agency to recruiters at Microsoft is to show how you spend your time outside of the classroom. If you have a 4.0 but only play video games when you’re not studying, your resume will most likely get thrown away. Don’t get me wrong, you could be a fantastic hire but a recruiter has no idea how you get along with others, your communication skills, or anything that’s not related to reading a textbook and taking a test to prove you read the textbook. The best way to showcase high agency is with leadership experience. Running your own business, being the vice president of your sorority, treasurer of your finance club, running your own charity, working a full time job to pay for school. These are all ways to demonstrate that you are someone who goes out and makes things happen. That you indeed have high agency.
- Previous Work Experience: Having already done the job makes it easy to get a similar job. This can sometimes be a chicken or the egg situation, where needing a previous job to get your first job isn’t possible. That’s why I think you should start small. For me, it started the summer after 8th grade. I got a job in the concession stand of my local city pool. It wasn’t fun work, but lead to my second job working for the famous Jack Stack BBQ in the catering department. That job lead to multiple summers working at two different golf courses as a cart boy. All to say that it eventually lead to my first real business job working as an intern on Fridays during the school year at a financial advisor company. I didn’t do much, but I showed up every Friday ready to help. Having that experience gave me the opportunity to work in FP&A at HR&R Block in Kansas City as a legit intern. That experience then opened the door to work at Microsoft as an FRP intern. Small beginnings lead to massive results. Having a crap job at the beginning can lead to your dream job later down the line. Start this path as soon as you can, because hard work compounds.
- Data Superpowers: In this modern age of AI, knowing how to work with data is critical. I’m not just talking excel skills. Being able to pull, manipulate, visualize, and tell stories with data is most of what you do in Finance at Microsoft. Having some programming or low code skills in data tools like python or Power BI can go a long way. This gets supercharged with tools like ChatGPT, where a little knowledge of coding can quickly make you on par with an entry level data scientist or software engineer. Imagine not learning email or Microsoft Office in the 90s. Not knowing email today is basically a firable offense. Using AI powered tools might have the same path in knowledge work. Get ahead and get data superpowers.
You might have all of those experiences and skills called out above, but that’s only half the battle. You still have to get noticed somehow. Either by a recruiter or someone else who works at the company. Here is what I recommend.
- Conferences: Microsoft has pivoted away from on campus interviews and now does a lot of recruiting at conferences. This is how the first round of interviews get offered. These conferences are usually meetings of large student organizations like Association of Latino Professionals for America (ALPFA), Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT), Out for Undergrad (O4U), and National Association of Black Accountants (NABA).
- Employee Referral: Getting your resume referred by a current or FRP alum can go a long way, but it’s no guarantee of an interview. The best way to get a referral is by actually knowing someone who works at the company, or having a shared interest with them. Blindly messaging Microsoft employees on LinkedIn could work, but you’d have better success finding someone who went to your same high school or served in the same branch of the military. Having a shared connection around a place or thing helps.
- Intern First: The best way to get a full time offer is to be an intern the summer before. 50-90% of full time FRP’s were an intern the previous summer. This is the path with the greatest opportunity of a job. Don’t go work at a bank in the summer, assuming you’ll get a shot at Microsoft in the fall if you don’t like your bank job. Be in it to win it from the start.
Current FRP’s
For folks currently in the FRP, I hope you’re having just as much fun as I did. Normally when working with FRP’s today I have to fight the urge to grab them around the shoulders and beg them to cherish being in the FRP (just like Billy Madison). In order to get the most out of the program you should do the following.
- Always ask for what you want. The biggest unlock I learned in the FRP is to just be up front with what you want in the rotation. Telling your manager at the beginning of the rotation what you’d hope to get out of the next six months can unlock doors you never thought possible. In my fourth rotation, they literally changed the entire rotation because I simply asked if I could solely work on building ML solutions. Don’t forget I’m still working in that job six years later. The best approach is to ask for what you want before you rank your next rotation. Bear in mind you can’t just say something like “I want to work with the CFO directly”. I’ve seen interns do this in the past, and it doesn’t end well for them. Know what you want, have some sort of skill or experience doing it, then ask for it.
- Always see who else is working on something first. It’s always fun to build something from scratch. An important skill to learn in the FRP though is building on the work of others. This is a key component of how impact gets measured at the company. In my fourth rotation, I was able to have impact 10x as fast on the deal pipeline analysis project because I found another data scientist team who already had a deal pipeline conversion model I could leverage and start using immediately. If I didn’t ask I would have spent most of my time trying to build one, which may not have been useful at all. Always ask around before building something new.
- Embrace serendipity. Your career path is never going to work out 100% exactly like you planned it, and you don’t want it to. You need to brace serendipity, keeping an open mind for making the most of new opportunities. The best example was the FRP in my class who got their dead last choice of rotation, but ended up working on that team full time post FRP. You never know where a road is going to take you. Don’t be afraid to explore different paths or see things through on an existing path.
Graduating FRP’s
My last piece of advice comes to those who are ending their FRP tenure and now look on to the rest of their career. It can be a scary feeling, so here’s what I recommend.
- Cast a wide net. Don’t just apply to one job, hoping you’re going to get it and end up with the perfect job. You need to apply to a crap ton of jobs. Don’t be picky. Even apply to jobs that don’t look exciting on paper, because that could change once you meet with the hiring manager. Serendipity could strike in your favor.
- The best jobs go to people with high agency. Your perfect job is out there, but it may not be listed on the internal company job board. So have high agency and chase down opportunities that don’t even exist yet. This starts months before graduation. You need to network with teams you are interested in, meeting with potential hiring managers who could one day give you a job. For me, I went to every business intelligence team in finance. I emailed the director level leader, gave my short sales pitch saying I wanted do work on ML solutions for their team, and asked if we could chat to discuss any openings on their team. I’d even ask them if they knew any other team I should go talk to. Most didn’t offer me a job. Some continued to offer me interviews years after the FRP. You just never know. If you are talking to teams that aren’t hiring, you are basically in your own talent pool. Looking for opportunities that might materialize later once you graduate. If a job does open on that team, who is their first call? Probably the person who proactively reached out and made a connection well before a job was ever created. Use this to your advantage.
- Join for the team, not the job. The job will eventually come. Being in the right position is important more than what you do. Most jobs after graduating may not be the most fun. They will be work, maybe even grueling. Someone needs to do the work and congrats it’s your turn to eat a plate of crap for the company. Going to the right team is definitely more important that getting the dream job you wanted on a crap team. For me, I took a job on my fourth rotations team. They said I could do ML work, but most of my time would be spent as a program manager (PM). I hated PM work, but knowing that part of my time could be doing ML work was all I needed to hear. Eventually my job morphed into 100% ML work after I was able to prove to my manager that I could have more impact on the ML side than the PM side of my job. Being on the right team or org allows you more opportunity to work on things you eventually want your career to morph into. The team I joined post FRP has now morphed into a 400+ person engineering team. One that’s quickly becoming the defacto engineering team in finance at Microsoft. Being on this team over the years has created much more opportunity compared to doing similar work on a different team. Thankfully I was well positioned, even though I didn’t have the ideal job initially. See what I mean? So don’t be too picky on the job, but more picky on the team.
Closing Thoughts
Being an FRP teaches you a lot. How to ramp up quickly on new skills, being able to juggle many things at a time, effective communication and teamwork, and countless other skills. All things that make you a well rounded person both professionally and personally. Some of my favorite memories come from the summer internship or hanging out with my FRP coworkers in building 26 (before they tore it down). I think it’s a great idea for anyone who is interested in technology and business. If you’d like to apply to the program, please do so on the Microsoft career website. Whether you’re interviewing for the FRP or trying to land your post FRP role, I wish you good luck!