Posted by scobleizer // Wed, Jan 4, 2006 7:12 PM
Meet Lori Lamkin, the Group Program Manager for Visual Studio Team Foundation. In this chapter of WM_IN, we find out from Lori what it means for program managers to “build the right product, on time”. After 15 years at Microsoft, Lori is still excited about coming into work every day and helping to make an impact and affect change in the high-tech industry. Get to know this former math major who finds herself on the bleeding edge of technology in our developer division.
Show: WM_IN
Tags: MS+Personalities
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| Video Length: 00:22:19
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Replies:
9
// Views:
13,199
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Hey lori, ever heard of color? 
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Why is the audio on C9 videos always so quite? You guys really need to work on this.
-Paul
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 | sflanker wrote:
Why is the audio on C9 videos always so quite? You guys really need to work on this.
-Paul |
Unfortunately we're stuck with the audio that comes off of the camcorder. My speakers have a volume knob that lets me turn up the sound. What kind of sound system are you using?
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Great post. Glad to see there are others with degrees in mathematics roaming the halls of software engineering.
Need to change the title of the post--last time I met Lori, she didn't have a "P" in her last name...
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| Wanek wrote:
Great post. Glad to see there are others with degrees in mathematics roaming the halls of software engineering.
Need to change the title of the post--last time I met Lori, she didn't have a "P" in her last name... |
Thanks, I fixed that!
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Who trains MSFT Product Managers? Do they have an internal goup or use an specific training partner?
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It sounded to me that Lori (spelled the same as my wife's name) described a "Program Manager" as what I would think of a "Product Manager".
Can someone here give the MS description of each job and how they differ?
Thanks,
BOb
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You are correct that many in the industry refer to our Program Manager discipline as "product management" and our Product Manager discipline as "product marketing".
A program manager is a dev team function. They define and manage the product based on the requirements, market data, market analysis, and research that a product manager (a marketing function) creates.
For example, on Visual Studio 2005, I wrote the Market Requirements Document for the full product line. That MRD consisted of customer types (segmentation), end-to-end use scenarios, and customer research (I also included positioning, messaging, disclosure plans, strawman media/PR plans, and other information as appendices for the dev team).
Folks like Lori took that data and translated it into more detailed scenarios, prioritized feature lists, feature specs, schedules, and other information that served as a blueprint for developers, testers, user education writers, localization engineers, build managers, and others in the several thousand person DevDiv (and beyond) org.
While the PMs and dev team worked furiously on delivering the bits, the product managers on my team worked with our worldwide field sales and marketing organization to prepare them to be able to sell, evangelize, and market all aspects of the product locally. As the product neared completion, the folks on my team also began preparations for our worldwide launch activities, in conjunction with our marketing counterparts in our worldwide subsidiaries.
In the end, it is an extraordinary team effort that requires a great deal of coordination and leadership. From translating our knowledge of our customers into products and business plans, to actually delivering a high quality tools release, to being able to sell and launch the product worldwide, holding that big box at the end of it all is one of the most exhilirating moments in anyone's career, and one of the biggest reasons why many of us love working at MS.
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