The Geek in question: 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.

When you're doing a master's degree you don't always think you're going to find a job that actually relates to what you've been studying, so the opportunity to be a PM with Popfly was really exciting.

How does it feel to work on a project that's so visible?
The short answer: It's really cool. When you're trying to build a new program at University, it can be a struggle to get, say, six people to use your tool and give you feedback. But we've got customers who are willing to take 10 hours to test the product and write an email, because they're just so excited. It's great! You get so much feedback from people, and we're really serious about taking the feedback and putting it back into Popfly.

We recently switched from alpha to beta, and it was great to sit back for a few hours and just watch at all the blogs and feedback coming in. I'm not obsessive about it, but we definitely watch Technorati to see people's responses, and if a blogger has a complaint, we try to respond so that they know we hear them.

So, it's not daunting at all? 'Cuz this is Microsoft, and people looooove to bitch about Microsoft.
You get some people who will misinterpret something that we do — and sometimes customers forget that oh, wait: they're dealing with real people on the other end of the feedback. They see Microsoft as this evil empire.

I mean, I was at University too, so I get it. There was definitely the feeling that Microsoft was the enemy! Then you come here, and you realize that not everybody is a Type A jerk. For example, I had no idea how serious Microsoft is about what personal information you can collect about users, and how it can be used. I have a lot more respect for Microsoft now, especially when I see how some other companies are sneaky about how they use personal information.

It sounds hokey, but the people I work with? They're smart. We've got this developer on our team who writes all these books. He's been here for years, and is really REALLY knowledgeable — I mean, he's writing books about this stuff.

Are you a compulsive student? What have you learned since you started a year ago?
I've dealt with a lot of things I didn't deal with in school. Working for Microsoft, you need to follow the security process or else you won't make your release. All the sign-off steps to actually do a release at such a huge company — there's a lot to it.

We're a little different from many products here — we're not Windows. We're not Office. We're not Visual Studios. Popfly is only about 15 people, and we're pretty agile and do a release really every four or five weeks, so we've really had to work to figure out our place in Microsoft's release process.

So, I have to ask: what's up with the Popfly ducks?
We had all these different photos on the website, stuff like dandelions and whatever. But the ducks were our favorite — we were told we can't actually use them as a brand, so now we have this logo with these two bubbles. But the ducks will stay. We love the ducks.

Oh, so you want some linkeez, hmm?
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