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Highlights
Years in Software
17+
Years Managing People
12+
Team Sizes
5-40 in past 7 years
Disciplines Managed
Engineering Managers
Technical Leads
Software Engineers
Software Developers
Product Managers
Software Developers in Test
Software Testers
Research Software Developers
Formation of Teams
Inherited teams
Built from nothing
Grown from small numbers
Teams in transition
Teams to be reduced in force
Companies
Bridgewater Associates
Microsoft
Google
Products
Bing
Cortana
Google+
Google Engineering Infrastructure
Office
Windows
Xbox
Types of Work
Auto suggest
Browse
Engineering tools
Identity
Infrastructure as a Service
Intelligent assistants
Search
SDKs
Developer Portals
Types of Environments
Incubation groups
Startup groups
V2 Efforts
Mature organizations
Established products
Key Positions
I held several positions over the past 15 years at Microsoft and Google. For simplicity I mention the highest position I held in each period.
Principal Group Engineering Manager
Microsoft, 2012-present
Directed teams of 25-40 engineers. Managed people managers. Lead flat organizations with tech leads. Coached people from college hires to principals through career, personal, and organizational transitions. Shipped features in established products like Cortana, Bing, Xbox, Windows, and Office. Ran a lean startup style innovation lab.
Engineering Manager
Google, 2010-2012
Directed a small flat organization with technical leads after starting off as a senior engineer. Shipped developer, QA, and legal features in the company’s engineering infrastructure.
Senior Engineering Manager
Microsoft, 2002-2010
Directed several small development and QA teams (5-30) in both people management and technical leadership roles. Shipped Bing’s Autopilot.
Products and Impact
Identity in Microsoft Apps
Currently working on developer ecosystem used by Outlook, OneNote, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and soon Skype, Teams, and other apps that supports easy authentication, credential storage, multiple identity management, across Windows, Universal, iOS, Android.
Cortana People Experiences
Cortana is Microsoft’s intelligent personal assistant. Delivered on product vision, execution strategy, development, and operation of Cortana’s people experience to help users better prepare for meetings by learning basic facts and insights about the people they are meeting with, powered by data from LinkedIn and Office 365.
Bing Autopilot
Bing’s deployment, rollout & rollback, monitoring & reporting, and health management PAAS. Delivered test automation, monitoring and reporting features, data modeling and visualization tools that hardened the service as it scaled from thousands to hundreds of thousands of machines.
Google Grok
Google’s internal large scale code understanding service critical to tools used by all engineers. Delivered index of cross language cross-references which enabled developers perform search and complex refactoring of code called in multiple languages.
Windows App Store Search
App stores of Windows & Windows Phone needed a revamp of search, browse, autosuggest experiences. Improved relevance, app discovery and download rates, addressed spam and other app store quality issues by leveraging Bing relevance, autosuggest, speller, query rewriting, and other tech. Shipped a new app search API and directed relevance improvement experiments.
Xbox One Third Party Data Portal
Microsoft’s home video game and entertainment console with features like voice navigation and cross app content search. Enabling such features requires third party data like movie and game metadata. Delivered a new portal where a third party can register, submit and validate datasets in a completely automated fashion that eliminated the need for vendors and reduced millions in associated costs and days in data ingestion timelines.
Windows Smart Search
Smart Search is Windows’s ability to blend search results from device, OneDrive, and the web. Delivered a backend that infers when a user has app search intent and delivers app results from the Windows store. Also a framework to deep launch apps instead of a browser for a better native experience of search results.