Sticking one toe in the water
I've been stressing out a little about what to write here. A lot of the other MSDN blogs are super technical, or as my friend Dave called it, "pontificating" on the merits of this or that coding approach, or technology, or whatever. Though I've done some (limited) coding in the past, for classes I've taken, or the really easy ASP/VB Script stuff in my consulting job, the bulk of my work experience has been more process-focused. To put it more bluntly, my fiance calls me a "professional nag". To his credit, he has been remarkably patient with my assignment of "action items" to him regarding our upcoming wedding (2 weeks!) and my attempts to "follow up" on whether he's done them. But I digress...
I've now been on the Speech Server Team for 3 weeks, so I'm still figuring out who's who and what I'm supposed to be doing. The cool thing about starting a new job is that every day, you feel just a little bit smarter than the day before. And when I think back to the first time I attended our team meeting (while I was still in the "transition" phase from my old job), I'm pleasantly surprised that I've managed to sort a lot of things out since then. Like slowly figuring out who people are and what they work on. The Speech Server team interacts with some other teams working on Speech technologies, plus we've got Marketing and User Education folks all together here in the same building. Which is a lot smaller than Windows (obviously) where I used to work, and where I never, ever met someone from Marketing.
The whole thing kind of reminds me of a West Wing episode from last season, where CJ spends her first day as the new Chief of Staff. I really liked that one - you could *feel* her stress as she just got slammed with more and more information and was expected to make split second decisions and just pick up where Leo left off. For a TV show, I thought it captured pretty well the essence of jumping into a new job.
Fortunately, my new job isn't as stressful as being the new Chief of Staff for the President. I've spent some time attending training, some useful (Engineering Excellence for New PMs, Security Basics) and some not (Project Management). I've talked to the Escalation Manager in PSS who handles our product (hi Brett!) and figured out how we can get PSS support incident data for our product on a regular basis. Now I just need to sit down and figure out the massive spreadsheet/query goo he sent me!
I spent way, way more time than anyone should, filling out docs to make sure we have PSS support for our upcoming Speech Server release. I suppose we could chalk that one up to "learning experience" but it doesn't seem right that one product should have a million different numerical or alpha identifiers that are all linked but somehow all different and get assigned for different reasons, by different groups around the company, at different times during the product cycle. Each one on its own makes sense, but it seems like they should somehow be reusable. I still can't articulate the difference between Product Family ID, two different kinds of part numbers, several different SKU numbers (for the same item!), Product ID, Product Key, etc. etc. I can tell you I am sure glad that Nathalie, our release manager, is all over this stuff.
I've also started planning for our TAP program that will start sometime in the fall. It's nice to come in right at the beginning and plan from scratch. It's also nice to have folks around who remember the last time this was done and can provide feedback on things to do and NOT do. I'm really looking forward to getting this program off the ground and actually getting back in touch with real customers. It's something I had all the time as a consultant, but haven't done much here at Microsoft.
If anyone out there is actually reading this, and has participated in a TAP or Beta program before either from the Product Group side or from the customer side, let me know what you liked and didn't like. I'd love to get some real feedback so I can incorporate some good ideas or avoid bad ones right from the beginning.
