In my 7 years at Microsoft, I've designed and built hundreds of features and many of these directly show up in the end user experience (also called UX). And this got me thinking - is there a "how to" on designing a great, not just good, user experience...

I got up this morning determined to get back to my exercise routine. Now I am someone who gets bored easily (as dear hubby will readily attest) and I need variety. So I turned to Netflix to rent out exercise videos. I loved Netflix's Instant Access as...

I had completely forgotten about this video that we had made for the Office Live community site almost 2 years ago! A friend just forwarded it to me and while I cringe at how unprepared I was in the video, I thought this was a great idea to put a face...

As a program manager, I know communication is key and email has taken on a life of its own as the tool. However, we have all been in those phone conversations where statements are lost in translation and recently, as my team and I sat huddled around a...

I read the book " Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell this weekend and just loved it! It was really easy to read and I really enjoyed it. I was also eager to apply it to my work when I design UX in my role as a PM. 1) The right and wrong way to ask people what...

One of my best friends promised me that I would like the " Eat, Pray, Love" book so here I was on Saturday- book in hand in sunny Seattle (Huh??) lounging out in my backyard. Let me start off by saying I had very conflicting feelings about this book and...

As I read the Mango Season by Amulya Malladi (thanks to a strong recommendation from my cousin), I realized there are some things that are just a part of you and I have to say it - Mango pickle is one of them. The book took me back to my childhood summers...

Wow, May was a really hectic month! We shipped our second minor release since our launch and this time around, OLW beta went international by launching it in Spanish, French, German and Japanese . We also listened really hard to our customers on the forums...

Wow! Its been a while since I wrote on this blog but I have been really busy working on some really fun stuff that I wanted to share with you! As you already know, Office Live Workspace Beta was launched this year and its been crazy, hectic and quite...

Recently, I interviewed a woman who asked me an interesting question - "How do you feel as a non-American woman to work for Microsoft?". I realized that I had stopped thinking of myself as something that is not the norm - a woman in a technical career...

This is what is so great about Microsoft - when employees get together and make a good case for a cause, the company rallies behind the employees. I witnessed this first hand last year as part of the core team behind APLDC - the 1st Asian Pacific Leadership...

In the past few weeks, I have found myself watching a number of "documentaries" - documentaries that cover a number of theories, some well-founded and others hmm,....not so well-founded but interesting anyway. I started with "The Inconvenient Truth" and...

In the past, each time after I have ordered the Thai Kitchen Cashew (w/o tofu) and my husband has ordered the veggie fried rice with eggs, we launch into this discussion on how we don't experiment with our food and how "next time, we should try something...

So, I decided after 4+ years at Developer Division, that I was ready for a change. Microsoft is an awesome company to work for in the sense that one can gain the experience of a completely different company with a completely different set of customers...

It came to my attention today that some customers are finding it hard to find the released version of Visual Studio that supports the just-released .NET Framework 3.0. Therefore, I figured it might be useful to walk through the various versions available...

My name is Kavitha Radhakrishnan and I am currently working as a Program Manager in the Developer Division PM team at Microsoft. The Developer Division PM team is responsible for the successful engineering, release, project management, and customer connection...