Christine Trudeau
Canada
“It’s the best job at Microsoft.”
Christine Trudeau’s enthusiasm for Microsoft Innovation Hub radiates through the Teams meeting she is on from her home in Ontario, Canada. With a career spanning more than two decades, multiple cutting-edge companies, and every major technological breakthrough since the advent of the Internet, she’s seen and done enough to make that call.
“We work with our clients to try and understand where they're at today and help them have a vision of what the future will be.”
Any accurate vision of the future is informed by the past, and Trudeau’s professional history perfectly complements Hub's broad focus and discovery-oriented ethos.
Arcade games ignited her interest in tech, and while she initially wanted to study mathematics in college, her employment-minded father thought business a wiser choice. That’s when she discovered Management Information Systems which allowed her to take all the math and computer science classes she wanted under the umbrella of the Commerce department.
Taking a job as a developer for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, she enjoyed her work, but felt constrained by the lack of social interaction.
“As much as I like creation and I like creating as a coder…I talk too much and so I was always getting scolded for disturbing the peace in the cubicles.”
"it takes time to solve today’s tough problems"
Like many early-stage setbacks this challenge led to an opportunity, as she recognized her skills with people, and began a journey that saw her regularly shift from customer facing roles to technologically intensive jobs and back again.
Following her stint as the chatty coder, she transitioned into a systems engineering role in the networking space.
"It was the hottest thing…and since then in my career I’ve been chasing the latest and greatest innovation. Every time I stay in sales too long, I feel like I need to be grounded because then I feel like I no longer fully understand the problems. So, then I move into a technical role where I can actually get dirty, and then I move back into a sales role where I can stand back and talk to Executives. That seems like a happy balance for me."
Her chatty nature would eventually prove quite crucial when she joined the Microsoft Technology Centers (the previous name for the Hub program) in April 2022, following more than a decade with Microsoft. Discovery is paramount at the Technology Center, and at the heart of the discovery process is time and communication. Initial engagements at the Hub are usually one day, but her clients typically wish for more afterwards.
“What I’m hearing after is wow I wish we would have scheduled two or three days…which is great…it takes time to solve today’s tough problems.”
Solving problems is why the Hub exists. An immersive exercise in the Art of The Possible, with an intense focus on discovery, she and her fellow Technical Architects are cross-technology experts who do much more than demonstrate new products and applications as they exist - they envision new futures.
"I am personally a big fan of Human Centered Design to try and get people to unlock innovation - to be creative, to think broader. "
“Nobody comes to the Hub to talk about something that is old. They come to the Hub to understand something new.”
Notice she said “understand.” Technical Architects at Microsoft do more than show, they help their clients comprehend the challenges facing their business and use technology as a tool to solve the problems.
"I am personally a big fan of Human Centered Design to try and get people to unlock innovation to be creative, to think broader. So that we’re not just talking about technology for technology’s sake. We’re actually solving a business problem. We’re spending more time in the problem space and less time in the solution space.
I like to make sure before we jump into solutioning something that we understand the problem we’re trying to solve, and that it’s the best and most important problem for the client to solve at that particular point in time."
Once discovery is complete, Christine and her fellow Technical Architects can then implement the entire breadth of the Microsoft portfolio to bring a business’s new future to life. Beginning with a rapid prototyping phase, the team quickly arrives at a first round of a tangible solution.
"We can give them something that can move forward with, and we’ll support them with hackathons…we have all these different things we can do with the client to help them move through that journey of digital transformation so that they can get their hands dirty, they can feel comfortable and confident about what the technology can provide, and that they get the most out of it."
Trudeau sees incredible transformative potential for her clients in the convergence of low and no-code apps with AI technology and natural language processing on the Power Platform. An early believer in the democratization of development, she sees these as ushering in a new era of creativity and innovation in business.
"It’s just going to unlock so many things that required specialized skills so that [people] can just do what they need to do to get the job done…you can just talk to it and say build me an application…and it will build it for you. I don’t think anyone really knows the potential of what we have in front of us, and I think this is exciting to see how its evolving so quickly and all the different places AI is going to touch."
Excited for what’s next is an essential quality in someone who spends their life transforming businesses. With her own children entering college and considering their futures, she sees limitless potential for them, and for humanity.
“I feel like now more than any other time in my career there are no constraints, like everything is wide open.”
When you’ve done what she’s done, and seen what she’s seen, then the cutting edge is pretty comfortable place to be.