Continuing my behind the scenes look into the community let’s talk about who the team is and what they do.  To set the stage we have a core team of 6 people working on this project spread across Redmond, WA; Fargo, ND and even Hettinger, ND! Although we are all US based today we have pretty diverse backgrounds including an Irishman, a Mexican, a Kiwi and of course a few from the USA. We meet weekly for 1 hour on a Monday at 1pm PST to talk through plans, make decisions and review progress on our individual workstreams. In terms of the roles on the team we have the following (semi official Microsoft definitions included)

·         Program management (Carlos, Redmond) - Leads the technical side of a product development team, managing and defining the functional specifications and defining how the product will work.

·         Software Development (Gerry, Redmond) - Codes and designs new software, often collaborating as a member of a software development team to create and build products.

·         User Experience (Zach, Redmond ) – Works closely with development, usability, and visual design to create rich and useful user experiences in many forms and different mediums.

·         Product Management (Shane, Fargo) - Creates the road map that takes Microsoft products from conception to launch, then monitors their impact throughout the product life cycle.

·         Product Marketing (Liz, Hettinger) - Develops and implements marketing strategies that drive faster adoption and deployment of products and services.

If I had to boil it all up and deviate from the official descriptions I would say this captures it.

·         Carlos –He writes the specs that make the whole world sing, manages the overall process and keeps the trains running on time in the dev side of the house

·         Gerry – We feed him Guinness and he writes the code

·         Zach – Designs a pretty and usable place for us to put everything (Shane helps with this too)

·         Liz – Organizes content, makes sure people know the site exists and keeps the marketing folks focused

·         Shane – Is a non traditional product manager and in fact does many things across all these areas including html, specs, production, UX etc

And then there is me falling into the official category of management overhead. I do also try to make sure no question goes unanswered on the community.

Next time I will dive into the outcomes of our latest weekly meeting and some of the discussions going on around future developments etc.