Microsoft International Tech Jobs Blog: Program Managment

Meet Ben in Program Management in Dublin, Ireland

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 11:19:43 GMT

Meet Ben in the Mobile Global Products Development team that is based out of Dublin, Ireland. In this interview you'll hear a little about his job and how he manages the time difference between Dublin and Ireland. He also talks a little about what he likes about Ireland.

Ben's team is growing really quickly and you can check out some of the roles on offer in the team's new microsite: www.joinmicrosofteurope.com . It's very cool.

We also have some exciting Program Manager roles in Denmark and Israel this month. So if interested in them check out the links going to their career sites on the right.

Have a great weekend.

4 Program Manager Opportunites in Ireland, Egypt, Switzerland and Denmark

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 09:11:10 GMT

Today I wanted to highlight some of the open roles we currently have in the Program Management space in Ireland, Egypt, Switzerland and Denmark. As you know this position can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. It can be a mixture of CTO, project manager, product manager, architect and developer all rolled into one. If you want a true explanation of the role check out my previous blogs under the PM category.

There are 4 brillant opportunities I wanted to highlight today:

The first, is a very exciting senior opportunity in the Windows Live Europe Team which is run by Dan Teodosiu out of Dublin, Ireland and specialises on online analytics and advertising technologies. Here's a snippet from the job description:

"The Program Manager role at Microsoft is situated midway between software engineer and product manager. Program managers are in charge of conceiving and specifying requirements and guiding the technical design of a product or service, and take a leadership role in the software development process. Program managers regularly engage with customers and other product teams and ensure that the “voice of the customer” is reflected in all decisions. Program managers often come from a technical background and are expected to come up with creative and innovative approaches to meeting customer requirements, including specifying the user experience (UI) for a product.

Microsoft’s Windows Live Europe team in Dublin is working with other groups in Microsoft to create a powerful next-generation advertising and web analytics platform. We are building visualization controls and content management applications to help advertisers and web site publishers better understand and monetize their ad campaigns and site usage. We use AJAX and Web 2.0 technologies, along with C++, C#, and ASP.NET. We follow agile methodologies and stay abreast of all technology trends."

The right candidate will need a minimum of 5 years of relevant product development experience (exceptional candidates with less experience will be considered) and recent programming experience (last 3 years) in any language (e.g. C++, C#, Java)

If you are interested in applying for the role or learning more about future roles in the group please send your details to Natalia Seaver at: v-natsea@microsoft.com

The second, is in the Cairo Innovation Centre in Egypt which recently created a senior role in their applied research, technology and incubation, adanced prototyping start-up organisation which works also with local research groups in the Middle East and Africa. The team is searching for a candidate with 8+ years experience working on software R&D and experience in one of the following language processing/search engines; VoIP,mobile, protocols (e.g. SIP); social software, web identity tracking, web security, and grid/super computing.

If you are interested in applying for the role or learning more about future roles in the group please send your details to Astrid Connolly at: v-astcon@microsoft.com

The third is in the Office Communicator Attendant Console team in Zurich. They recently created a UI PM role open that is a mid to senior range role. The ideal candidate will have 3 years experience with formal software program management, a background in user interface design.

If you are interested in applying for the role or learning more about future roles in the group please send your details to Sarah James at: v-sarahj@microsoft.com

The fourth is in Microsoft Dyamics, the highly successful ERP/CRM/SCM softrware product development group in Veadbek, Denmark is growing quick and has two senior PM roles on offer. To be successful in this role you need to know how supply chain business processes work and you also need a strong technical knowledge making it possible for you to specify the required functionality. Ideally, you should know Dynamics AX and SCM functionailty. In addition, you need to have 8 years experience at least in shipping SCM software from inception to market place.

If you are interested in applying for the roles or learning more about future roles in the group please send your details to Leila Kuhn at

v-lekuhn@microsoft.com

We also have a lot of open PM roles in Israel, China and India which I'll be talking about in th future. And don't forget we also have tons of PM roles open in the US as well! So there's loads of choice to choose from!

Don't forget another way to keep learning about Microsoft International core-tech roles is to subscribe to one of the RSS feeds on the right or all of them if you are a RSS junkie and don't want to miss anything! :)

Program Management explained?

Fri, 11 May 2007 14:05:22 GMT

Program Management is kind of a unique position in Microsoft that is mix and match of responsibilities from an Architect, Technical Project Manager and Product Manager. I was thinking of launching into an explanation of what this really is when I remembered just before I started to hit my fingers off my keyboard that Steven Sinofsky did a great job of describing the role and its responsibilities in a detailed blog entry he did in December 2005 for his MSDN Microsoft TechTalk blog for college grads interesting in learning more about careers in Microsoft.

Here's s snippet from it:

"Up front I would say that the PM role at Microsoft is both unique and one that has unlimited potential -- it is PMs that can bring together a team and rally them around a new idea and bring it to market (like OneNote, InfoPath). It is PMs that can tackle a business problem and work with marketing and sales to really solve a big customer issue with unique and innovative software (like SharePoint Portal Server). It is PMs that can take a technology like XML or graphics and turn it into an end-user feature benefitting 400 million people (Office Open XML format or the new graphics functionality in Office12). I could go on and paint a very emotional picture, but let's spend some time digging into the more analytical aspects of the job.

Where developers were focused on code, architecture, performance, and engineering, the PM would focus on the big picture of "what are we trying to do" and on the details of the user experience, the feature set, the way the product will get used. In fact the job has matured significantly and it is almost impossible to document a complete list of the responsibilities of program management. One way to do that is to list the sections of a specification for features in Office that a PM would complete before the code gets written which includes nailing the scenario you are solving for, the worldwide implications (will your work make sense to customers in China, India, Estonia), how will developer customers extend the product (object models, programmability), is the product secure and is privacy maintained, what are the other features your work interacts with, will the feature be responsive and performant, and more. These are critical parts of the design of any product, and when you will have 400 million potential customers thinking these through before you start the work is critical."

To find the full blog entry go here. It's an excellent overview and still very valid today.