Set the product strategy for Microsoft Azure's cloud data warehouse service

Imagine you have just been named head of product for Microsoft's cloud data warehouse on Azure. What would you do to make the offering stronger? Lay out the objective you would set, the customers you would focus on and the problems they have, the changes you would prioritize, and how you would know the strategy is working. ```hint Start from won and lost deals Before proposing features, ask why a data team picks Azure's warehouse over another cloud warehouse, and why existing customers leave. The pattern behind those wins and losses tells you which customers and which gaps deserve the investment. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Does the role cover only the warehouse service itself, or also the Microsoft analytics products around it, such as the data lake, Spark and the Power BI integration? - Is the business goal consumption revenue, new wins against competing warehouses, or retention and expansion of current customers? - Which customers matter most right now: enterprises moving on-premises SQL Server or legacy warehouses to the cloud, or cloud-native data teams comparing several vendors? - Is this a one-year roadmap or a multi-year strategy, and are pricing and packaging in scope, or only the product? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - An explicit objective grounded in where Azure's warehouse stands against other cloud warehouses and in Microsoft's enterprise strengths - Segmentation of warehouse buyers and users (platform owners, data engineers, analysts, finance) with a reasoned focus and ranked pain points across migrating, loading, querying, governing and paying - A prioritized, sequenced set of initiatives, separating parity gaps from real differentiators - Success metrics such as production consumption, competitive win rate and retention, with guardrails on customer cost and reliability - Risks specific to this space: overlapping Microsoft analytics products, disruption for current customers, and pricing changes that cut revenue ### Follow-up Questions - Microsoft sells more than one analytics product that can serve as a warehouse. Would you merge them, keep them separate, or move customers from one to another, and how? - A large customer says it will move to a competing warehouse because its monthly bills are unpredictable. What do you do this quarter? - Which single metric would you report to Azure leadership every month, and what result would make you change course?