Show Chapters

Full-text transcript

• Coming to America (01:15)
• Coming to Microsoft (03:50)
• Blaster (09:16)
• Cortana (20:05)
• The Speaker (22:03)
• Trust and AI (31:11)
• Promotion to Partner (40:04)
• Partnerships (46:30)
• What brought Harris outsized joy (55:59)

Links from the show

• Blaster Worm
• COM
• DCOM protocol specification
• Harmon Kardon Invoke speaker
• Send me feedback!

Music credits

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Track: Lost In Medina — Amine Maxwell [Audio Library Release]
Music provided by Audio Library Plus
Watch: https://youtu.be/qNSdpqSkRe4
Free Download / Stream: https://alplus.io/lost-medina
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Show Chapters

Full-text transcript

• Intro (00:36)
• What is a PM? (00:58)
• Remote is hard (03:39)
• Pivotal Moment #1: Moving to Redmond (04:46)
• Great Managers (07:24)
• From Feature Team to Cross-Team Collaboration (08:23)
• Owning cross-company collaboration (10:44)
• From acquisition to a partnership playbook (16:39)
• Creating the Visual Studio Code C++ Extension (17:30)
• Pivotal Moment #2: Becoming a Manager (21:05)
• Autonomy vs. Directed (23:58)
• Has your perception of a manager changed much now that you are one? (25:04)
• Situational Leadership (26:16)
• Coaching vs. autonomy (30:27)
• Pivotal Moment #3: Dev to PM (32:47)
• What brought Rong outsized joy (37:12)
• Outtro (39:46)

Links from the show

• A Great Boss is hard to find, difficult to leave, and impossible to forget
• Send me feedback!

Music credits

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Track: Lost In Medina — Amine Maxwell [Audio Library Release]
Music provided by Audio Library Plus
Watch: https://youtu.be/qNSdpqSkRe4
Free Download / Stream: https://alplus.io/lost-medina
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Show Chapters

Full-text transcript

• Intro (00:36)
• The mystery of the churning Jupyter notebook users (01:45)
• The importance of understanding your users (09:32)
• From an aptitude test in high school to industrial design (13:05)
• Learning industrial design at Western Washington University (15:10)
• First job out of college (17:59)
• Getting fired from her first job (20:15)
• Becoming an intern again (22:04)
• An opportunity to learn what she really wanted to do (22:48)
• A crash course in becoming a UX Designer, on the job (27:05)
• Why team is more important than technology (30:22)
• Jill is now a full-time employee! (36:03)
• On rediscovering things that bring us joy (38:16)
• How to optimize your Kindle experience (41:03)
• An outsized amount of joy: a plain air tripod (45:05)
• Conclusion (47:33)
• Outtro (48:43)

Links from the show

• Jill's Instagram
• Jill's web site
• AIMS Aptitude Testing
• Libby
• Story Graph

Music credits

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Track: Lost In Medina — Amine Maxwell [Audio Library Release]
Music provided by Audio Library Plus
Watch: https://youtu.be/qNSdpqSkRe4
Free Download / Stream: https://alplus.io/lost-medina
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Link

Link to the full-text transcript

Show Chapters

• A Pivotal Moment: Getting Healthy 01:32
• Writing down calories in and calories out 03:00
• Tim's first adult bicycle 04:33
• One in, one out 06:37
• Change can be more permanent if you do it with others 07:39
• Early career: developer evangelism 08:54
• Into the lion's den: Open Source 10:08
• Better ways to learn from our field organization 12:31
• How to listen to your biggest fans 16:07
• A Pivotal Moment: moving from evangelism to product 17:49
• The ship bug 18:57
• Some career advice 21:22
• A Pivotal Moment: moving into people management 22:22
• Finding time for IC work 23:45
• Beginner's mind 25:37
• Tip: creating separation between work and home 27:12
• It's not just people that change, organizations can change too 30:10
• A Pivotal Moment: someone saw something in Tim 31:48
• Old tools vs. new tools: which are more productive? 35:12
• Access 2.0 36:47
• Low code vs. high code vs. ? 38:34
• Pickleball: An outsized amount of joy 40:33

Links from the show

• Tim's Twitter
• Tim's Web Site
• OSCON 2006: The Lion's Den
• Moots Cycles
• Pickleball in NYT

Music credits

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Track: Lost In Medina — Amine Maxwell [Audio Library Release]
Music provided by Audio Library Plus
Watch: https://youtu.be/qNSdpqSkRe4
Free Download / Stream: https://alplus.io/lost-medina
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Feedback wanted!

Please send specific feedback to: jlam@iunknown.com and help me make the show better for you!

• What would you like to get out of this podcast series?
• What other questions would you like me to ask?
• What other guests would you like me to talk to?

Link to the full text transcript

Links to sections (with timestamps)

• Intro
• Change: 01:34
• Changing from Academia to Industry: 01:46
• Changing from the Army Rangers to Microsoft: 03:02
• Changing from Bay Street to Microsoft Way: 04:36
• Changing from solving other peoples' problems to creating problems for other people to solve: 05:56
• Changing a role from PM to Developer: 09:12
• Moving from Windows to DevDiv: 12:08
• Change is the only constant: 16:17
• School doesn't always prepare you for the job: 23:34
• Learning on the job: 25:39
• Trying on the new job for size: 30:17
• A (somewhat) traditional Microsoft Internship: 30:54
• The value of a co-op program: trying many different jobs on for size: 32:30
• From an MBA to Data Science: 36:31
• On making mistakes: 40:18
• Conclusion: 48:07

External Links

Music credits

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Track: Lost In Medina — Amine Maxwell [Audio Library Release]
Music provided by Audio Library Plus
Watch: https://youtu.be/qNSdpqSkRe4
Free Download / Stream: https://alplus.io/lost-medina
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Links to sections (with timestamps)

• Larry's been here for 37 years 10 months ... or has he? 01:53
• Carnegie Mellon in the 1980s: 03:04
• Interviewing for a small 500 person startup in Seattle: 06:01
• Meeting Steve Ballmer, "Head of HR": 08:23
• Interviewing with Gordon Letwin: 10:50
• Flying to Paris to fix a floppy drive bug in MS DOS 4.0: 13:33
• Burgermaster for lunch and naming objects in MS DOS: 16:58
• Documenting the creation of Windows NT: Greg Zachary and Helen Custer: 19:35
• On the importance of lunch conversations in driving the culture of a team: 23:30
• It's Alive! Windows NT running Reversi on an i860 emulator: 28:04
• Thursday Beers, MAPI Beers and the Weekly World News: 30:08
• Rewriting the Beep() API in Windows Vista to save tens of millions of dollars: 34:22
• Larry's brief tenur in Microsoft Research: 43:14
• The legendary Exchange Server "Stonehenge Party": 49:03
• Scalability Day and Microsoft's beginnings as an enterprise software company: 55:26
• How Larry's biggest feature in Windows 7 kept killing gamers in-game: 01:04:44
• The origins of the Windows Runtime team in Windows 8: 01:07:09
• The origin story of the IUnknown.com domain name: 01:11:26
• How Larry enabled language projections in WinRT using COM: 01:12:34
• From Windows to Azure: Confidential Compute and encrypted VMs: 01:20:13
• On joining DevDiv and the Azure SDK team and becoming "mini-Jeff": 01:27;17
• What advice would you give someone just starting their career at Microsoft? 01:32:28
• Something that gave Larry an outsized amount of joy recently: 01:37:21

External Links

• Larry's Glowforge
• Larry's ornate box, cut on the Glowforge
• The Goupil G4 with the showstopper floppy drive bug
• Gordon Letwin
• Showstopper by G. Pascal Zachary
• Inside Windows NT by Helen Custer
• PC Roadkill by Michael Hyman

Music credits

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Track: Lost In Medina — Amine Maxwell [Audio Library Release]
Music provided by Audio Library Plus
Watch: https://youtu.be/qNSdpqSkRe4
Free Download / Stream: https://alplus.io/lost-medina
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Table of Contents

• How the Customer Driven Playbook influenced how Sid thinks about PM (14:34)
• How Sid prepared for his informational interview with our team (15:49)
• The importance of preparing for your informational interview (17:23)
• How we structure our PM interviews in DevDiv (19:40)
• Imposter syndrome and what we can do about it (24:05)
• On rubrics and career progression (28:54)
• Side-hustle entrepreneurial thinking while working at a big company (34:20)
• Learning about customers via jobs-to-be-done and customer interviews (41:52)
• The lack of respect that PMs face when working with some engineering teams (46:24)
• On the importance of autonomy and agency in the PM role (55:52)
• Building products is a team sport (57:00)
• Travel bidets, cultural barriers and friction in experiences (1:00:36)

Transcript

Link to the full text transcript (with audio player!)

Links

• The Customer Driven Playbook
• The Jobs-To-Be-Done framework
• The Hypothesis Progression Framework for Customer Development

** Some of the above links are affiliate links for which I earn a commission from the vendor if you purchase a product.

This week, I'm talking with Dustin Campbell, a Principal Software Development Engineer who's been working on tooling at Microsoft for nearly 15 years. He's worked in Visual Basic.NET, the Roslyn C# compiler, the C# extension for Visual Studio Code, and the WinForms designer in the latest release of .NET Core. He has an undergraduate degree in jazz performance guitar, which naturally led him to building spam tools for his father, then to a software sweatshop in Las Vegas before finally landing at Microsoft.

Along the way, I learned what distinguishes compiler engineers from other species of software engineers, whether there is any hope for paring down the concept count to empower non-professional software developers, and why immutable synax trees are awesome.

Links from the show

-

This week, I'm talking with Jeffrey Mew who's been working on quite a few projects on my team at Microsoft for nearly 3 years. Jeffrey's a graduate of the unique co-op program at the University of Waterloo in Canada, where he interned with us before making the decision to come on as a full time employee.

Today, we talk about what makes the co-op program at Waterloo unique, and why Microsoft values so highly the graduates of this program. In fact, at one point a few years back when we hit "peak Waterloo", we had 5 Waterloo graduates on our team! We talk about how PM is really an inter-disciplinary career and what you might be able to do to help prepare for this during school.

Along the way, Jeffrey shares with me how he gained valuable experiences in each of the three major projects that he's done at Microsoft: launching Jupyter Notebooks in VS Code, partnering with Facebook on PyTorch tooling, and building a brand new data wrangling experience in VS Code.

Links from the show:

• University of Waterloo Co-Op
• Jupyter Notebooks in VS Code
• PyTorch in VS Code
• Data Wrangler is coming soon :)

Link to full text transcript

• Tim Urban's Life Path Picture
• Tim Urban's Primitive Mind and Higher Mind
• Daniel Pink's The Power of Regret
• Ivey Business Review
• Instagram - Guan's Art
• Bret Victor Inventing on Principle
• YouTube - Gawx
• YouTube - Frank Tedesco's OMEGLE playlist
• Sharon's TikTok

Music credit:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Track: Lost In Medina — Amine Maxwell [Audio Library Release]
Music provided by Audio Library Plus
Watch: https://youtu.be/qNSdpqSkRe4
Free Download / Stream: https://alplus.io/lost-medina
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Link to the full text transcript

Music credit:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Track: Lost In Medina — Amine Maxwell [Audio Library Release]
Music provided by Audio Library Plus
Watch: https://youtu.be/qNSdpqSkRe4
Free Download / Stream: https://alplus.io/lost-medina
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––