A Popfly PM talks about going from alpha to beta, working with smarties, and what’s up with the duck
Suzanne Hansen
The job title:
Program Manager, Non-Professional Tools
How did you get here?
Well, I was doing my master’s degree at University of Victoria, working on an open source project for Eclipse and other very non-Microsoft things. Some people from Microsoft Research came by campus to look at student projects, and mine was slightly different because I was looking at how novices learn how to program.
I’d applied once to intern at Microsoft and didn’t even get an interview, and I’d thought to myself, “Fine. So that’s how it’s going to be.” But apparently the Microsoft Research team remembered my student project a year later when John Montgomery (my manager) was forming the Non-Professional Tools team, and I was called in.
