Speaker 1: 0:08

Hello, welcome to Microsoft Community Insights Podcast, where we share insights from the community expressed in Seattle today in Microsoft. I'm Nicholas. I'll be your host today In this podcast, we'll dive into a theme of the women of Microsoft the storage innovation. So before we get started, we'll remind you to follow us on social media so you never miss an episode, and it helps us reach more basic people like yourself. Today we have a special guest called Miri Rodriguez. Could you please introduce yourself?

Speaker 2: 0:41

Yes, hi, nicolas, I'm so excited to be here. I'm Miri Rodriguez, a senior storyteller at Microsoft, also the CEO of Impressai and the author of the book the Women of Microsoft.

Speaker 1: 0:53

Yeah. So before we get started with that, what is your role? Senior storyteller? Do you just tell stories with your colleagues or clients yeah, a little bit, yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:13

So I sit in the USPSI, which stands for Public Sector Industries, in the MTAPS organization, the sales organization, and my role really is to think about customer and sales enablement from a storytelling perspective.

Speaker 2: 1:19

So this is where our very niche customers in the government sector, public sector they are still modernizing are very niche customers in the government sector, public sector they are still modernizing.

Speaker 2: 1:27

They're still thinking about going to the cloud or they're already there, but they're not there fully yet, they haven't adopted 100%.

Speaker 2: 1:33

And so when we're here on the brand side selling, co-pilot and selling these new innovations that we have at Microsoft level, I sit in the middle to basically share that information in a way that it makes sense, in a story way, and so we create content that is relevant to them. We create content that aligns to what is happening in their environment and what matters to them, so that they can understand how we are partnering with them, how we're enabling them with these technologies that they may not have available yet or be able to implement just yet because of modernization. So there's still this bridge. There's a bridge that we close when it comes to branding and customers that are nuanced in their own sectors, basically. So I work with our sales team and our marketing team. Internally, we also use stories such as wind wires and we turn them into case studies or use cases to talk even more about the things that we're doing with other customers. So it's what we're doing internally at Microsoft and how customers are doing outside of Microsoft.

Speaker 1: 2:31

Okay, so the stories of how they go from start to the completion of the journey, the journey Adoption, whether in Microsoft, yeah, yeah, and you're trying to make that into a use case, or whatever it is, it could be a use case, it could be a case study as well if we have enough data.

Speaker 2: 2:50

A lot of times, especially right now in the era of AI, there's a lot of use cases. We're thinking of agents and implementation of bots technology, ai technology, especially in the servicing the constituentsent citizen services, for example. So we're seeing a lot more use cases and these enable other governments local state, local governments to say, hey, if this government, if the city, is doing this, we could also do it. So we are really trying to tell those stories, to let others know that this is something that Microsoft is leading in this space and that we're partnering with governments everywhere, and so those, those stories enable that conversation not just to sell the product, but to say, hey, we already have a use case.

Speaker 1: 3:31

another state, another company or another city already did this yeah, because the stories can even attract potential clients as well. So that's quite so. What does a typical day look like for you?

Speaker 2: 3:41

yeah, uh, it's. It's a very not typical day. Every day changes and it depends on what comes to us. So, for example, it can be anything from I wake up and there's emails about a particular communication that we want to share out because there was a new policy that was written at the federal government level that's affecting. So it could be anything that is affecting in terms of current events. If that happens, then we decide are we going to be proactive with this message? Are we going to tell a story about that? How do we enable our sales team? So that's always happening on the back end. That's always something that can be part of my every day.

Speaker 2: 4:14

I create content as well, so thinking about what we call industry sales kits, conversations with our own internal sales teams, what they need from us to enable them to go talk to our customers and wind wires, use cases, storytelling, triaging our teams go in and they talk about what they've done outside of Microsoft, and then we turn that into stories. So there's everything from that. We're busy with the AI tour right now at Microsoft. So it's a lot of engagements, what we call customer engagements, internal and external, and how we enable that, and it's very fluid because every event is different. We have marketing-led events, we have field-led events. So I step in in different ways depending on what the events are going on at the levels that we serve, and my job is to make sure that, from a content perspective, we're being proactive or reactive or somewhere in the middle. So there's a lot happening.

Speaker 1: 5:07

Okay, so for each large event, like, for example, ai Tour 1, you create stories based on the images or pictures, or content based on those.

Speaker 2: 5:17

So I'm not creating those stories. So when our customers meet at these places and they have questions and they want to know, the field comes back. Our salespeople come back and they say, hey, Miri, we had this feedback from our customer, we had this conversation. And then I step in to say, OK, how can we respond to that? How do we tell a story that enables them to understand better a product or understand better the roadmap or integration? So it's a reactive approach in story to the conversations that are being had at the events.

Speaker 1: 5:47

Okay yeah. How did you get to this role as a storyteller? Did you progress the choice? What makes you want to be interested in the role? Is it a new role?

Speaker 2: 6:01

I didn't know this role existed and Microsoft was actually invited to apply six years ago to a role that said storyteller for engineering. I was actually in the engineering organization when we were doing our digital transformation journey internally at Microsoft, and so they wanted storytellers. They wanted people that had a comps and marketing background to come in and define these stories, design these stories about our own journey to the cloud internally, and so I was brought in to talk about that. I was doing data and AI and thinking about stories within engineering. So after that, I found actually a big community in storytelling Within Microsoft. There's about 4,000 storytellers worldwide, so there's a lot of people that are dedicated to telling stories.

Speaker 2: 6:46

These are different parts of the organization, different verticals, so it doesn't have to be engineering, it could be finance, it could be obviously marketing and comms and there's visual storytelling like video storytelling, so there's so many ways that you can be a storyteller at Microsoft. There's not just one, so you find your role based on the need that the vertical, the organization may have. I've been a storyteller throughout, you know, the last six years uh, six and a half years and it's been in different organizations and, like I said, now I'm now I'm in the public sector, sector, industry. So I did go to school to go to storytelling. I didn't have a. I did have a good background with comps and marketing, and so when these new roles started to open up, I was you know, I was up to the task and I was able to apply and yeah, plus, creating a good story, well, I try, yeah, audience as well.

Speaker 1: 7:32

Keep up to it. Like, if you have a good story in, like a presentation, anything, you keep your audience attracted to it. So that's, it's amazing as well. So the one key point of it. So I? A few weeks ago, you announced your new book, the Woman of Microsoft. So congratulations, and I just want to ask what inspired you to create the book and write the book? Is it because there's lots of amazing women in Microsoft that you want to just tell a story in the book?

Speaker 2: 8:05

Yeah, so actually what inspired me was my co-author. So I'm a co-author in the book. Her name is Isabella and she is a woman. She's a program manager, a product manager in Poland, and she reached out to me last year in August via Teams and she's like hey, mary, I know you already wrote a book and you're a published author. I would love to learn, because I have this dream of creating this book for Microsoft's 50th anniversary. So it was her vision and so we talked about it a little bit and at the end of the call she invited me to actually be a co-author, which I was like oh no, no, I'm not going to write anything. I'm like I'm not interested. But she really she was very persuasive. She's like I really would love for you to be part of this project. So I was like, oh, okay, I was really busy, but I decided that I would take on the project and I'm glad I did.

Speaker 2: 8:55

When we spoke and she really told me her vision of really creating this, this compilation of stories from women from every level of the organization, so entry level all the way to senior CVP level, across the organization, from all the verticals. So it's 50 women every level, across the organization and across geographic locations, so we have, from every continent, a lot of different countries. I thought that was a beautiful, beautiful way to celebrate microsoft's 50th anniversary. That just just happened and we're celebrating that and I thought it's a beautiful idea around highlighting the efforts and the untold stories of women who have shaped this technology and this company and the culture of the company. And so we actually made an open call.

Speaker 2: 9:38

It was my idea to go on LinkedIn and say hey, we have this book if you're interested. We made an open call and we got a lot of people interested and we basically they shared their stories. So Izzy Isabella she had an idea of some of the people that she wanted to have in the book, but a lot of them were people that raised their hand and said I would love to tell my story, which was amazing it's. It's a really great book around what it is to be what I call the she of microsoft, the women at microsoft, and what we've gone on and and how we shift the technology and the culture and our own personal transformation stories.

Speaker 1: 10:14

How do you go about selecting lots of women because they're different parts around the world? Do you just put in like a form, a Microsoft form, and just share it to social media?

Speaker 2: 10:26

We just took everyone that signed up from our open call and then this big Excel file. It was full of colors, because Izzy was like she's a product manager, she was very organized and I was like these colors are driving me crazy. But she was looking and she was saying, okay, this person came in and they live here. So when we had everybody that came in and said, they raised their hand. After that we looked and we're like, okay, what are we missing? Are we missing someone from, you know, africa? Are we missing someone from latin america? So we've been.

Speaker 2: 10:55

Then look, took a look and decided where we needed to make a call further than the open call. And so then we reached out to some women and said, hey, you know, we know that you're from here, you're from this part of the country or whatever. We'd love for you to be part of this project. So, but we didn't actually have to do that a lot. It was probably maybe less than 10, because 90% had already signed up. So it was a really spontaneous and organic gathering of these stories how long does?

Speaker 1: 11:23

it? Probably doesn't take that long to write it because you get information from the stories from the women around the world and just collect it into one book as well.

Speaker 2: 11:33

Well, yes and no, and that's what people think. When you have a compilation, it's probably all you just put the stories together. But it's not that easy and this is how we did it. So we decided on 12 chapters and named the chapters and gave them the abstracts of the chapters and name the chapters and give them the abstracts of the chapters. So the women that signed up, we said hey, you choose, look at the chapters and you choose which chapter you think you're going to contribute to, right. And so we gave them time to go and contribute.

Speaker 2: 11:58

And what's interesting is when we get that content back, the stories are so different when they see, like there's one we talked about resilience. Resilience means so many different things to so many different people. Right, resilience is something that to them in their own story, it means something different. So it was very interesting to get that work back and see their own experiences under the umbrella of resilience and then being able to plug that into the themes of the book themselves. So there was a lot of work done to be able to blend those stories that would feel that they naturally fit into the themes of each of the chapters and that's the magic.

Speaker 2: 12:36

That's actually something I had never done before as a writer, so I developed a new skill set this time around. But it was fascinating when I read these stories. I mean I even changed some of the titles of the chapters based on the stories I read, because sometimes as an author you think you have an idea, but the content kind of comes alive by itself. The book has a voice. And I realized I was like, wow, these stories are going somewhere. And I gave us you know, we gave ourselves the flexibility to change some chapters names or the beginning of the chapters, to make sure we blended the stories and we honored each of the stories.

Speaker 1: 13:12

So so would you say, those are lots of your challenges. When you come to write, pull it together and and then put on a story together and change the title as well. Is that the main challenges that you had to overcome?

Speaker 2: 13:26

yes, so. So I would say there was challenges. The challenges really were around, for me and, I imagine, for Izzy. You know it's when you think about what we crafted the book in a way that each chapter shows up each of the women in a, in a light that is not always the same. It's not like saying, oh, and here's the story of miri, and here's the story of miri again, and it was just like chapter blends it in. So there was a lot of um strategy, content strategy to make the stories shine, each within the chapters, in a way that honored them but also didn't feel monotonous in a way for the readers.

Speaker 1: 14:16

Okay, so what do you plan to? Because I saw a few days ago you've been highlighting some of the women that are on LinkedIn to give them a spotlight. So is that you think? Is that one of your highlights of the book itself? Just the women that come forward to tell their stories different parts of the world in Microsoft?

Speaker 2: 14:40

Absolutely. So what we're doing is we started to, by chapter, chapter by chapter, we started to highlight each of the 50 women. So every day I do one, izzy does one, and we kind of give a little teaser about what the story is about their personal stories that they're sharing. What we're also going to do is there was a lot of content that we couldn't. We were supposed to submit I believe it was 60,000 words. We had over 75, almost 80,000 words together. So we have to cut down a lot, and so what we wanted to do is continue to honor those stories and the you know, the untold parts of the book that we could plug in, and so what we're planning to do is actually have a podcast series to bring the women in and talk about those.

Speaker 2: 15:23

The pieces of content that were didn't make the book, but we want to tell that story, so we do want to honor them, um, in the best way we can. These stories and you know, are not just stories, they are their wisdom, you know, they have to show them in each of them. Each, each chapter has a two parts. At the end it has a kind of a, an inspiration for the journey, like what is, what is the life lesson in this, but also we have practical advice for women about being confident about career and journey, about biases and challenges as a woman, I mean so. So each chapter is women. Readers are going to walk out with this idea that somebody went through something that looks like something that I went through, and how did they manage it and how can I manage it.

Speaker 1: 16:07

So it's going to be very practical advice as well okay yeah so those are like highlighting some advice for young women that want to come forward later on to tell the stories. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what's next after the book? Is it the videos that you mentioned?

Speaker 2: 16:25

So the book comes out in August, and so what we're doing is we're going to kick off a PR campaign and hopefully also a book tour, city book tour, many women around the world.

Speaker 2: 16:44

What we would like to have is one reading day where every woman who's a part of this goes to a local library and does a reading of the part of the book. So in one day, all of us across the world are going to be gathered somewhere reading our part of the book, and it's going to be so powerful. And then, of course, I travel a lot, so I'm hopefully going to kick off a fall tour right after the book comes out, which is in August. So book comes out in August, we'll do a book tour and we'll do that one moment where all the women are going to rally around, basically the launch of the book. So we're excited and the women are so excited. We actually had one of the women who is the co-chair of the Women at Microsoft ERG, so she's actually promoting the book at the ERG and we're really excited about how this is going to be empowering, inspiring many women, not just at Microsoft, in the industry, right in the tech industry. So we're excited.

Speaker 1: 17:33

So have you considered like asking women that take part in the stories to go to the library to do a signing book signing?

Speaker 2: 17:40

Yeah, yes, absolutely. So in the book tour, hopefully we can do some signing. Uh, I'll be announcing the cities that I'll be in and then people can come and we can definitely sign the books.

Speaker 1: 17:49

So okay, so what other? So take it that's happening in three months, right, that book tour, yeah. So what advice would you offer young women that's trying to go into tech or amazing, like stories?

Speaker 2: 18:09

yeah. So you know, I get, I get approached by a lot of young professionals, rising professionals, and most of the questions they ask is about confidence. It's like, miri, how can I show up confident? You know, I do so well in every other aspect that I feel that I can't come forward and show up as confident as I want to. And I find that very interesting because the first chapter of the book talks about what we call code and confidence, and it's how the she, the Microsoft women built that for themselves, how there's a platform that you have to build to become confident.

Speaker 2: 18:40

Confidence it comes from two factors there's one that is internal and there's one that is external. It's your environment, and so if you're, you know you're working internally to become confident, but you also have to make sure that your environment around you, that you build an environment around you that enables confidence for yourself. And a lot of times we don't, we don't think about that, we don't have a shield, we don't have a protection, we're not intentional about these things that are in our environment, around us, that affect our confidence 50% of it. And so I talk about that and I talk about, basically, a framework that I developed for myself that I call learn like love. Learn yourself, then like yourself and then love yourself.

Speaker 2: 19:17

That's something that I went through personally, and so I give the women advice to say confidence is something that you build with a lot of intention and it comes from an internal and external environment, so you have to create both environments for yourself. You have to procure that. You have to make sure that there's people rallying about around you, people that love you. Not everyone wants to see you succeed, so there's a lot of competition and so you have to be aware of where you step in and how you show up. You know, I tell women all the time delete and block Are your best friends on social media. If somebody's showing up and giving you negativity, delete and block them. That's part of your confidence. Delete and block them. You don't need them in your life, right? So develop that attitude of protection of yourself and your energy.

Speaker 1: 20:03

Protect that energy, because not everybody wants to see you succeed. So, yeah, I normally tell people that ask me it's like a block, negativity, and only just be honest to yourself, to be true to yourself and then that's it, that's it absolutely okay, uh, so do you have any last many advice or recommendation for any other women that want to come forward?

Speaker 2: 20:24

Yes, absolutely. So. First of all, read the book. I hope that you will enjoy it. We took a lot of time to carefully curate and craft stories that matter that I know are relevant to a lot of women, not just in the tech industry but in the world. So I hope you enjoy the book and we have a lot of practical advice for you there. Second, if you don't know your story yet, if you don't know what your story is about, craft it, write it, put it together, create your own story, and then that gives you the confidence to talk to the people about it. That is your why. Why are you here? Why do you want to do it? Give yourself a mission in order to go out to the world. Don't just have aspirations and dreams, but give yourself a mission. I'm here to do this. This is what I'm going to do. My brand is about this. My vision is about this. Sorry, there's noise in the background.

Speaker 1: 21:10

No worries.

Speaker 2: 21:11

And so it's all about how you present yourself in the world, for the world, and why. What is your why? And so think about those things. It's important because when you step out with those, with those, the world is yours in a different way yeah, it's like creating the stories of yourself to see who do I want to see you and stuff.

Speaker 1: 21:33

Yes, yes, oh, so curious. How long does it take you to put this book together? Do you have different versions of the book and then you have to just keep taking a few months to draft it up?

Speaker 2: 21:45

So you know, it's interesting as a writer when I focus on the book. It already comes to me the whole thing, chapter by chapter, so I don't have to go back. I actually don't go back much. In this particular book, the publisher, which is Wiley it was a different way to manage the publishing, because normally I was used to sending content and then they have the editor review the content, give you feedback and whatever.

Speaker 2: 22:09

Yeah, this time they said no, we just want the full manuscript already, just hand us the manuscript. So I was like, okay, so we worked on the manuscript. Uh, izzy and I, we wrote. You know, I wrote six chapters, you wrote six chapters, we put them together and then we handed over the manuscript. And it was really fascinating because when we got the edits back, it was almost nothing. It was little grammar things here and there, but the content itself was good and they. So it's our first draft that got published. So we're really excited because it means that the stories are really really good so it's probably quite powerful as well when people have those stories.

Speaker 1: 22:43

Yes, Okay so thank you for joining this episode, maria. Thank you. Hopefully this will allow the viewers to know more about the book and purchase it, because it's now available on Amazon. We'll check and O'Reilly.

Speaker 2: 22:58

Yes, o'reilly. On O'Reillycom it's really online anywhere, so you can look at Barnes, Noble, different bookstores as well, amazon, of course, but if you go to Wiley Publishing or Wileycom, w-i-l-y, that's our publishing house. Anywhere outside of that, you can just actually Google Women of Microsoft Book and you can buy it.

Speaker 1: 23:19

Yes, Okay, so yeah, outside from work, work, mary, do you have any hobbies? What you do in your spare?

Speaker 2: 23:26

time. Yes, well, I love to read, obviously as a writer, so I have a stack of books that I enjoy, but I enjoy to read in different fun. You know fun places parks, uh, beaches. I love nature, so part of my reading environment and I also do yoga, so I love to. My hobby is to spend time in nature.

Speaker 1: 23:46

We are nature, so reconnecting myself, grounding myself, so you like hiking and those things.

Speaker 2: 23:53

Hiking yes, I love all of that, and of course I love to take a yoga class and Pilates, so all those things really energize me.

Speaker 1: 24:02

Okay, that's brilliant. Do you have any uh events that you're going on any more ai tours coming up or any things?

Speaker 2: 24:11

65. I'll be speaking at the m365 conference in vegas in may, um, and I'll actually be delivering a session entitled how to Train your AI to Build your Personal Brand, so it's going to be basically around prompting to build your brand. So we actually have some tickets available. If you want to see me in Vegas, it'll be fun.

Speaker 1: 24:33

I'm curious to ask whether there's any AI stories in your book.

Speaker 2: 24:37

Yeah, we'll talk about it. We'll talk about it. For sure, we would definitely touch on AI a lot in the future for sure.

Speaker 1: 24:45

Yeah, thanks for joining this episode, brie. Thank you for having me. Yeah, no, worries, bye.