My goals for the next year

First of all, my apologies for the lack of posts lately.  June and July are always busy for me, with the combination of vacation, regular work, and our annual review process.

As part of our review process, we ask all of our employees to step back and think about how they did for the past year, and what results they are striving for in the next year.  Many people take this kind of a personal inventory around New Year's (though, I hope, less formally than our annual review process).  The result of this is typically packed athletic clubs in January :-).  Microsoft's fiscal year runs 7/1 to 6/30, so from a work perspective our annual introspection ritual is time-shifted by six months.  I have not, as yet, noticed an uptick in athletic club usage in July for Microsoft employees.

As C# Product Unit Manager, my high-level goals are:

  • To win the hearts and minds of professional C# developers and non-professional developers (all languages).  Metrics for this include:
    • Increasing transparency of our development practices by delivering pre-release code via Community Technology Previews (CTP's) regularly, and reviewing early product plans with the community
    • Growing C# Dev Center traffic, ratings and visitor satisfaction
    • Growing the number of "Top 100" Bloggers on the C# team
    • Increasing MVP satisfaction
    • Delivering highly rated talks at major conferences
  • To drive tools share and revenue
    • Increasing C# usage among pro devs
    • Driving adoption of VS Express products
  • To deliver the right products with high quality in a timely manner
    • Shipping Whidbey on-time, with high-quality
    • Driving early planning for Orcas for C# and Express
    • Supporting and servicing VS 2002, VS 2003 and VS 2005
  • To drive a high performance culture, thus increasing the capacity of the C# team to deliver value for customers

I'm excited about the work ahead, especially about shipping VS 2005, which has received so much positive feedback from C# customers already!

--Scott