Alyssa DeLouise is a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, where she works on operating system and cloud hardware strategy for Microsoft 365 Online. Her job is centered on a practical but complex question: how do you modernize a large fleet of cloud services while keeping it secure, reliable, and running efficiently for customers? That work is one of the reasons she chose to study Systems Engineering & Design at Michigan Engineering.
In this interview, she shares how her path from an undergraduate electrical engineering degree to industry product management led her to graduate school, what balancing work and an online degree has been like, and what she hopes prospective students know before they begin
I am a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, and I work on operating systems and cloud hardware strategy for Microsoft 365. A lot of my job is figuring out how we move a very large, global fleet of machines to the next generation of technology, whether that is a new operating system, a more secure platform standard, or new cloud hardware. The challenge is making those changes without disrupting the services people rely on. I work with engineers across many teams to understand what needs to change, where the biggest risks are, and what order we should roll things out. I am often translating between very technical details and a program plan that many different teams can act on. What I like most is the scale. A well-designed change can improve security, reliability, or efficiency across a broad set of services, but it has to work for teams with very different systems and constraints.
I graduated from Purdue University in 2022 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering and a minor in Entrepreneurship and Innovation. I loved the technical problem-solving side of engineering, but I also kept gravitating toward questions about people, priorities, and why we were building something in the first place. The entrepreneurship courses helped me recognize that interest. During my undergraduate internship opportunities, I explored both software engineering and product roles, and product management felt like the right home for my first post-grad role. It lets me stay close to engineers and technical decisions while also thinking about customers, strategy, and how all the pieces fit together.
I chose Systems Engineering & Design because my work made me realize how rarely a large technical problem is only technical. Moving cloud services to a new operating system or a new generation of hardware also involves security, reliability, cost, timing, customer risk, and the readiness of many different teams. It is possible for each team to make a reasonable decision for its own area and still end up with the wrong result overall. I wanted better tools for stepping back, defining the real problem, comparing options, and understanding the trade-offs across the whole system. Michigan felt like a strong fit because the program is rigorous, but the course content and the ideas shared are also practical enough to use in the work I am already doing.
Studying online was important to me because I had just begun a career I was genuinely excited about. I did not want graduate school to mean walking away from that momentum, and I also did not want work to become a reason I postponed my genuine interest in this area or furthering my education. The online format gave me a way to do both. Some weeks, I learn a framework in class and recognize almost immediately where it could help me at work. Other weeks are simply busy, and balancing the two takes more energy than I expected. The flexibility is real, but so is the responsibility. I have had to become much more intentional about my time, and I have learned that flexibility only works when I give school a consistent place in my schedule.
What has stood out most is how much I learn from the experiences other students bring with them. Because so many people are also already working in industry or have had related internships, class discussions rarely stay theoretical. The same open-ended problem can look completely different to someone in manufacturing, healthcare, or software, and hearing those perspectives has made me question my own assumptions. The program has also changed the way I approach my job. I am less likely to rush toward the first reasonable solution. I spend more time asking whether we have defined the right objective, included the right stakeholders, and understood the risk we are actually trying to reduce. That shift has made me a more patient and thoughtful product manager.
I would recommend the program, with the expectation that it needs to be treated as a real commitment. What makes it worthwhile for me is how closely it connects to my work. I can learn a way to evaluate risk or compare alternatives, then use that thinking while planning an operating system transition, considering new cloud hardware, or talking through a security and reliability decision. I am not waiting until graduation to see the value. The program is already changing how I approach problems. For someone who wants to broaden the way they think and is prepared to make space for the work, I think it can be incredibly valuable.
My biggest advice is to decide when school will happen before the semester becomes busy. If I leave an open space on my calendar, work will usually find a way to fill it. I also try to open assignments as soon as they are posted, even if I am not ready to start them. Knowing where I am confused gives me time to ask better questions instead of discovering the hard part at the last minute. I would also encourage new students to reach out to classmates early. It can be easy to treat an online course as an individual experience, but the people in the program are one of its greatest strengths. Finally, let the people you work with know what you are balancing. It is much easier to plan around a difficult week when you are not trying to manage everything silently.
I would tell prospective students not to wait until their background looks perfectly aligned with the words “systems engineering.” Mine did not. My path moved from electrical engineering, to product management, to large-scale cloud infrastructure, and I entered the program because I could see how much I still wanted to learn. I did not already have a complete systems perspective; I wanted help developing one. That is part of what makes the program meaningful to me. People arrive with different experiences, and those differences make the learning richer. If you are curious about how technical decisions connect to people, organizations, and long-term outcomes, you may already have more of a systems mindset than you realize.
