How would you run the first 90 days after taking over GitHub

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Microsoft is a productivity, software, AI, gaming, and cloud company; its products include Windows, Microsoft 365, Teams, LinkedIn, Xbox, Azure, Dynamics, and Copilot.

You have just taken over leadership of GitHub within Microsoft and are expected to create a credible first-90-days execution plan. The focus is not on redesigning GitHub or proposing a single feature, but on how you would quickly understand the business, align stakeholders, identify urgent execution gaps, and set up the operating system needed to improve outcomes.

GitHub serves a complex ecosystem: individual developers, open-source maintainers, enterprise engineering teams, security and compliance leaders, administrators, and Microsoft sales/customer-success teams selling GitHub into large organizations. Your plan should account for GitHub’s role in Microsoft’s broader productivity, cloud, AI, and developer-platform strategy while preserving developer trust and platform independence.

This is an execution-focused question. The interviewer is looking for how you structure the first 30, 60, and 90 days; how you decide what to inspect first; how you establish ownership and cadence; and how you handle dependencies across product, engineering, security, support, sales, legal, and go-to-market teams.

The experience should consider:

- The key stakeholders you would meet early, including GitHub product/engineering leaders, enterprise customers, developers, open-source communities, Microsoft field teams, and security/compliance partners.

- How you would diagnose the current state of the product, business, customer experience, and internal execution model.

- What operating cadences, decision forums, and accountability mechanisms you would put in place.

- How you would prioritize urgent issues versus longer-term strategic bets across developer experience, enterprise adoption, AI, security, and platform reliability.

- The dependencies between GitHub and Microsoft teams, including Azure, security, sales, support, and enterprise account management.

- What success signals, health metrics, customer feedback loops, and leading indicators you would track during the first 90 days.

- How you would communicate progress, risks, trade-offs, and decisions to executives, employees, customers, and field teams.

- How you would define go/no-go criteria for major changes and avoid disrupting trust with developers or enterprise customers.

The goal is to present a practical 90-day leadership and execution plan that shows how you would build context, create alignment, identify the highest-leverage problems, and establish momentum without prematurely jumping to a solution.