Achieve your career and life goals sooner by learning from the pivotal moments of my guests. Each Monday a new guest, mostly working in tech and Microsoft, will share with you pivotal stories from their careers and lives and the lessons they learned. Hosted by John Lam.
Harris Syed defied conventional wisdom in his unlikely journey from Pakistan to the Partner band at Microsoft.
11 Jul 2022
Ep. 13 Rong Lu: from Engineer to PM to Manager, her 16+ year journey at Microsoft
Rong is a PM Manager at Microsoft and a 16+ year veteran of Developer Division. This is the story of her journey from engineer to PM to PM Manager, and from China to the United States.
27 Jun 2022
Ep.12 Jill Jacobson: on UX Design at Microsoft, her circuitous journey to UX design from industrial design, and rediscovering joy from creative pursuits
Jill shares with us her story of resilience and grit that leads to her current position as a Senior UX Designer at Microsoft. Jill turned the disappointment of being fired from her first job in industrial design into a successful career designing some of the most complex user interfaces at Microsoft.
20 Jun 2022
Ep.11 Tim Heuer: on changing from evangelism to product development, making changes to his health, and the characteristics of a great PM
Tim Heuer is a Principal PM Manager at Microsoft. A 17 year veteran of the company, Tim shares with us some pivotal moments in his life: getting healthier, transitioning from evangelism to product, moving and getting re-org'd at the company, becoming a people manager, and creating a healthy work-life balance.
13 Jun 2022
Ep.10 The Wisdom of my guests: looking at my conversations with my first 9 guests through the lens of Change, Trying on the Job for Size, and Mistakes
Looking back at the interviews with my first 9 guests through the lens of Change, Trying the Job on for Size, and Mistakes.
6 Jun 2022
Ep.9 Larry Osterman: on working at Microsoft for over 37 years from MS-DOS to Azure and advice on how to have a long and productive career at the company
Larry Osterman is a Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft, and he's been here for over 37 years! In a career that starts with MS-DOS and continues today with Azure, Larry has seen it all and shares not only his stories, but the accumulated wisdom he has gained in his distinguished career.
30 May 2022
Ep.8 Sid Unnithan: on changing jobs at Microsoft, preparing for informational interviews, imposter syndrome and autonomy in the PM role
Sid Unnithan is an early in career Program Manager 2 on my team whose career spans both Windows and the Python team in DevDiv. We talk about the importance of having autonomy in your job. How product building is a team sport, how to deal with negativity from others and how to interview to move laterally within the company.
23 May 2022
Ep.7 Dustin Campbell: on transitioning from PM to Dev mid-career, building .NET developer tools and escaping from a software sweatshop in Las Vegas
Dustin Campbell is a Principal Software Development engineer at Microsoft who's been working on .NET developer tooling for the past 15 years. He's also a jazz guitarist, a reformed spam tools creator and an escapee from a software sweatshop in Las Vegas.
16 May 2022
Ep.6 Jeffrey Mew: on experiences at Microsoft as an early-in-career PM, the Waterloo co-op experience and the impact that has had on him, and his love of optimization
Jeffrey is a graduate of the co-op program at the University of Waterloo. In his 3 years at Microsoft, he has shipped the Jupyter Notebooks in VS Code experience, partnered with Facebook on PyTorch tooling, and is building a brand new data wrangling experience in VS Code.
9 May 2022
Ep.5 Sharon Xu: on changing careers from finance to tech, how a joint degree in business and engineering made it possible and her experiments with art and social media
Sharon Xu is a Program Manager on the Python Team at Microsoft, holder of a degree in Engineering and Business from the University of Western Ontario in Canada, and a retired currency trader.
2 May 2022
Ep.4 Leo Yao: on his immigrant journey from China to Microsoft, what it was like going to college and interning at Microsoft during COVID, and his first impressions of life as a PM
Leo Yao is the newest member of our PM team at Microsoft, a recent graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and an immigrant from China.
25 Apr 2022
Ep.3 Ryan Bouchard: on using data science to grow products, managing a team of data scientists, and moving from the Army Rangers to a career at Microsoft
Ryan Bouchard is a manager of data scientists at Microsoft, a Ross School of Management graduate from Michigan, and a US Army Ranger.
9 Apr 2022
Ep.2 Joe Binder: on what Program Managers really do, learning from his mistakes in his 18+ year career, and the balance he gets from kayaking on Puget Sound
Joe Binder is an 18 year veteran of Microsoft and Developer Division, with nearly all that time spent as an individual contributor. Joe's my boss today, and we look back on his time at Microsoft and the many lessons learned along the way.
9 Apr 2022
Ep.1 Austin Henley: on moving from a professorship at Tennessee to Microsoft, open problems in developer tools research, and bouldering to strengthen the mind and body
This is a conversation with Austin Henley, who recently joined the PROSE (Program Synthesis) team in Microsoft's Developer Division from the University of Tennessee where he was an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department.
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