How I spent the week of April 29th, 2007

April 23rd - 29th, 2007

Monday

11-5 pm - 1:1 meetings with my direct reports. Most Monday's are back to back meetings all day with my direct reports. I think this is one of the most important parts of people management, this is our only semi-structured time for career development discussions, mentoring, coaching, catching-up, etc.

Although sometimes I have to reschedule these as other meetings come up at the last minute, I really value this time with my team.

If you aren't having a weekly 1:1 with your manager and a quarterly 1:1 with his manager I would strongly advice you doing that. Also I think it is important to have semi-regular 1:1's with your direct peers (i.e. the other people reporting to your manager) and your project team peers (i.e. those people in a similar level in different disciplines working on the same project as you).

This is a great time to step back from the day-to-day work and think about the longer term, where are we going, why, what is important for us to be successful, what is important for me to be successful, what does success look like for our team, how can we learn from our past mistakes and make improvements, what more can we be doing to be even more successful.

Tuesday

10-12 pm - project update/status meeting. Well at least that was what it was supposed to be, but when I arrived our internal partner team had invited an external potential business partner. I wasn't too happy about this. I like to be prepared for meetings with external partners, not know left me unprepared. I don't like to be unprepared.

12-1 pm - weekly lunch with my peers. Just an opportunity to stay in touch on a more personal level.

1-3 pm - 2 hours with no meetings booked. I sat in my office staring out the window thinking what I was going to do with myself for 2 hours, then realized I had 300 unread emails in my inbox of 2000 messages and worked on email for 2 hours.

3-4 pm - 1:1 with my manager. Talked mostly about recruiting and hiring.

4-6 pm - Continuation of the feature review meeting from last week.

Wednesday

10 - 11 pm - 1:1 with engineering manager.

11 - 12 pm - sync up with PM in redmond on partners team about long term planning.

12 - 2 pm - My manager asked me to attend a Leadership meeting for the MSR-A lab.

3 - 5 pm - There have been a lot of organizational changes recently within our larger organization and within our main partner team in Redmond. This meeting was an opportunity to begin talking about our long-term strategic direction, what success looks like, what is our core competence, how can we capitalize on the current opportunities, etc.

I think we had some good discussions and will be meeting more on this in the near future.

Thursday

10 - 11 am - Recruiting call with US Product Planner candidate.

I took the rest of the day off, as my parents are visiting from Canada and I wanted to have some time to show them around Beijing.

Friday

8 - 9 AM - Weekly ship meeting with Redmond product team.

9 - 10 AM - Virtual team sync-up meeting.

10 - 1 PM - Email and lunch.

1 - 2 PM - Project planning review, woring on finalizing product plans for each of our major projects for the next six months.

2 - 4 PM - Met with my peers in Development and Test to talk about longer term planning, group strategy and resource allocation.


April 30 through May 7th was a national holiday in China called Golden Week. I spent most of it with the my wife, daughter and parents in Hong Kong. You can read more about our trip on our family blog at http://aboutmacbeth.com/family.

How I spent the week of April 22nd, 2007

Sorry this is a little late. I actually completed this posting, but it somehow got lost before I could post it. The editor for Sharepoint Blogs is terrible.

April 16th - 22nd, 2007

Monday

10-11am - recruiting phone call with a Product Planning candidate in the US, we are trying to hire a Product Planner for the work we are doing around Search in China. In Microsoft a Product Planner is half-way between Marketing and Product Development, they are generally responsible for longer term product strategy, competitive analysis, etc. More of an externally facing role, understanding the market, business strategy, as compared to Program Manager who focus more on the product/feature.

11-1pm - 1:1's with my direct reports

1-2pm - project post mortem

2-3pm - A few key people from our partner team in Redmond are leaving their current positions, we met to review what impact that would have on us in the long term.

3-5pm - Review with Harry Shum. Harry has recently taken a new role as Chief Scientist for the Search & Advertising Platform Division. This was a review to help Harry get up-to-speed on the work being done in MSR-A around Internet Search.

Tuesday

10:30 - 12pm - Executive review with Craig Mundie, I presented an overview of the Search Technoogy Center to Craig Mundie, the Chief Research & Strategy Officer. With BillG starting to get ready for leaving Microsoft Craig is taking a more active role, and direct management resposibility for Microsoft Research.

1:30-2:30pm - project status update for a new project we are starting to work on. I usually attend project status updates only at the beginning of new projects, so that I can ensure I understand what we are planning and provide some guidance around how it fits in with the other projects we are working on and our longer term strategy. Once I project has it's own momentum I usually leave it to the individual PM's to drive and try not to get too involved in the day-to-day execution.

3-4 pm - sync up with a PM from a partner team.

4-5 pm - STC PM weekly meeting. This is the only time all of the STC PM's meet, since most are engaged on different projects. This is an opportunity to review organizational changes, talk about long term strategy, discuss HR issues and process, learn a bit about the other projects, and generally just stay in touch with what each of the PM's is focused on.

Wednesday

8-11 am - hosted Vietnamese business delegation. Microsoft has a very strong working relationship with the Vietnamese government and business, I was asked to speak with a delegation of business people from Vietnam about work we are doing in China regarding Internet Search.

11-12 pm - lunch 1:1 with a direct.

12-2 pm - another Harry project review.

3-4 pm - meeting with a PM colleague visiting from Redmond, she manages a team that we work closely with, so I wanted to make sure we had a chance to review how things were going and what we could do to improve the working relationship. We have had some challenges in the past getting on the same page, nothing major, but definately an area that I think we can improve on.

4 - 5 pm - 1:1 with one of our engineering managers, I have started having monthly 1:1's with all of the engineering managers in order to better understand what we are working on, get feedback on the PM team, and generally find ways for us to help the engineering managers more. This is also a rare opportunity to talk a little more about the future and where things are going, as usually when I meet with engineering managers it is very focused on a specific problem or project.

Thursday

10 - 11 am - UI review for a demo we are developing.

11 - 12 pm - sync up on next steps for a problem we are having with an external partner.

11:30 - 1:30 pm - Harry project review.

2 - 4:30 pm - Harry project review.

4:30 - 6:30 pm - Harry project review.

Friday

8 - 9 am - weekly sync up meeting with Redmond partner team. Our main partner team in Redmond is the Live Search organization, we have a weekly ship meeting to review progress and blocking issues on all of our four main projects.

This is definately a critical success factor for remote development, have a regularly scheduled ship meeting with people on your partner team that can effectively unblock issues and be an advocate for the work you are doing, plus this is an opportunity to make micro-course corrections based on real-time developments in Redmond.

9 - 10 am - virtual team sync up, one of our new projects is still in the early stage and is still being driven by a virtual team.

This is not a critical success factor, in fact I would say it is likely a critical success inhibitor. The fastest way to doom a project to fail is to create a virtual team. If you can't find the right person to drive, you can't execute effectively. Hopefully in the very near future we can move from virtual team to more accountable model.

9 - 10 am - project sync up. We recently signed a big International deal and I was asked to step in and help with a few issues related to the execution of that deal in China.

You will notice that this meeting overalps with the last meeting. This is actually quite common for me and forces me to make difficult prioritization decisions. Generally I try and attend the most strategic meeting, other factors are if we already have good representation from our team at the meeting.

In general in this blog I have only been indicating the meeting I attended, to avoid confusion. In this case I attended this meeting and missed the virtual team meeting.


10 - 12 pm - we are trying to lock down our plans for one of our main projects based on feedback from our last round of reviews in Redmond, this was a meeting to review the feature list for that project and prioritize and review the resource allocation.

1 - 2:30 pm - mid-year career discussion with a direct report.

3 - 4 pm - go/no go decision meeting for launching a new feature on one of our projects. We decided "no go" as the benifits were quite small at this time and their was reasonable risk.

Canadian missing in Syria!

When I lived in Vancouver I played a lot of ultimate frisbee, one of the teams I played on a lot was called The Fluffy Bunnies. When I return to Vancouver for vacation I often have a chance to play with the team. A few years ago, when I was still living in Redmond, WA I went up to Vancouver and played with the team for a few games in the summer, I think it was probably around 2003 or so.

There was a new player on the team that I hadn't met before, but was quite good (especially since she had never really played Ultimate before) and was a super nice person. Her name was Nicole (Vienneau), I didn't know her last name until very recently.

I received the following information about her from a friend in Vancouver and wanted to do everything I could to help. Here is her story, hopefully someone that reads this will be able to help, or at least pass the story on to someone that can.


Nicole (Vienneau) has gone missing during the final weeks of a trip to Northern Africa, the Middle East and Turkey. She was last heard from at the end of March, and we believe she was in Syria at the time on her way to Turkey.The Canadian embassies in Syria and Turkey, the RCMP and Interpol have been involved in searching for her for the past two weeks.I am sending this to you for two reasons: 1. the story will be in the media today. Since Nicole is a resident of Vancouver, there may be somewhat more media attention there than in Toronto. I wanted you to be aware of this from me before you heard it elsewhere2. if anyone has any connections, or knows of anyone who does, with people in Syria and possibly Turkey, we would most appreciate if we could take advantage of contacts there to help in our attempts to track where she has beenHer brother Matthew has set up a blog entry (link below) which has a lot of the details.



Website: http://vienneau.livejournal.com/39588.html

Her brothers blog postings also got dugg on digg, if you don't know what that means, you probably will want to stop reading now.

Here is the story on Digg:

People often talk about how Web 2.0 is the future and the future is now, using Digg as a key player in the life altering transformation. When I read the commentary on Nicole's story on Digg I was sickened. The maturity of many of the comments is frighteningly low, I hope this isn't the future of the Internet and our society. It reminds me of the kind of behaviour you used to see on Newsgroups and BBS's in the early days of the Internet. In fact these are probably the exact same people, just a generation removed. They are not blazing a trail to the future, they are just wasting their lives away wading through their own muck.

Have a read of the comments on the story, I would be interested if you really think these are the people we want to be representing the current climate in our high-tech society. I for one would emphatically say "NO!!!".

I Hope there is a turn for the better in Nicole's story, I will be thinking about the brief time I spent with her and remember the lasting impression she made.