How the IE team is organized

The information published in this post is now out-of-date.

—IEBlog Editor, 20 August 2012

As we’ve been posting we’ve been mentioning our titles, but we haven’t really explained what those titles mean or what we do on the IE team, so I thought I’d explain.

Like many Microsoft product teams, there are three primary job functions that are dedicated to IE: Development, Test, and Program Management. In addition to these roles, we have key members of our virtual team who are shared with other parts of the Windows organization; these are jobs like SDK Writer, Localizer, Designer, Product Manager (a.k.a. Marketing), and Usability Specialist. These are critical roles for us, but I won’t spend a lot of time here describing those roles.

The IE team is lead by Dean Hachamovitch, our Product Unit Manager. He is the “CEO” of the IE team and has overall responsibility for all things IE. Specifically, we’re responsible for current issues with IE (e.g. security or hotfix requests) as well as the future of IE worldwide.

The rest of the team is organized by job function, with each of the functional managers reporting to Dean.

The Development team does the architectural design and actual programming for IE. This group is lead by a team of development managers and architects, one of whom you’ve met on this blog so far, John Bedworth.
 
The Test team is responsible for defining and measuring the quality of the product. They are lead by our Test Manager, Scott Stearns.

The Program Managers are lead by our Group Program Manager, Tony Chor (that’s me.) We have two primary responsibilities. First we drive the feature design of the product (understanding what our customers are doing and what they want, translating that information into features, determining what the UI looks like, etc.) Second, we manage the process of developing and releasing product (managing schedules, dependencies, tradeoffs, communication, etc.) Since many of you know Dave Massy, I’ll note that Dave is part of this Program Management team.

The leadership team (Dean and his direct reports) is responsible for defining the strategy and priorities for IE, allocating people and time to the various projects we have, and ensuring our work meshes with broader initiatives like Windows XP SP2.

Across the functional roles, we have feature teams that include the developer, tester, and program manager plus design, marketing, usability, etc. The scope of a feature team might be an end user feature like popup blocking or a broad initiative like performance or globalization. The real work of defining, developing, and shipping individual features happens at this level.

Given the complexity of what we do across our diverse user bases, the huge number of sites and applications we interact with, and the truly global nature of IE, we feel this organization allows us to both coordinate our efforts across IE as well as provide the in-depth attention each area demands. It also allows us to best grow the skills of our team members.

I hope this helps provide some insight into our team and some context for the posts and comments we’re making.

Thanks.
 Tony