This past week, I unlocked an important PM achievement: interviewing customers face-to-face. In fact, after 12 customer interviews in 4 days, I found it both exciting and challenging, especially for someone who hasn’t done it before. (I had had customer interviews before, but only over Skype.) Thanks to the unexpected challenges posed by these in-person…
Author: Ellery
A technique to validate customer problem statements: whiteboarding
I would like to share a new technique useful for PM’s I learned in the past week: how to use a whiteboard to validate a customer problem statement. Part 1: The whiteboarding technique The whiteboarding technique I learned is quite simple to describe: you write your problem statement on a whiteboard, and really put each…
The ubiquitous storytelling
Storytelling is everywhere! If you saw the title and opened this article, chances are you’ve been trained to accept the importance of storytelling like Newton’s Laws to physics. 100% onboard with this acknowledgement, I want to spotlight the presence of the storytelling technique in a few very different areas that I’ve been exploring. 0. A…
3 months in. A long way to go.
Remember, remember, the 4th of December… Three months ago, on December 4th, I joined Microsoft as a full-time employee. Based in Vancouver, BC, I work as a program manager on the Engineering System team. Before I started my job, I had a million ideas rolling around in my mind about what life would be like…
Tips for working under jet lag
Recently coming out of the worst jet lag I’ve ever experienced — and to top that off, starting on a new job with a big jet lag — I can safely say that memory is one I never would want again: feeling tired exactly nine to five, then not being able to fall asleep at…
History teaches us about asset pricing volatility
Recently by chance I came across a paper (see Reference section) titled The boats that did not sail: Asset price volatility in a natural experiment. It grabbed my attention because it proposed a very creative way of applying approaches in natural science to the field of finance. This paper studied capital markets with very long information delay:…
What is cloud?
I want to talk about cloud. Everyone seems to have heard about it, but not everyone understand what it means. In my opinion, the essence of cloud is resource aggregation, and the two pillars making it possible are the ability to coordinate large-scale resources, and the division of resource’s ownership and usage.