Mairéad Áine O’ Donovan VS DATA Release Program Manager

To provide an introduction to myself, first and foremost my name is Mairéad Áine O’ Donovan, if you’re Irish you’ll have no problem pouncing the first part of my name, if you think of parade and place an M in front then that’s it exactly, I am not going to bother with the second part, although I have heard onion being used at times;-).

Within the VS DATA team, I am the Release Program Manager for the Whidbey release. The release PM role is also commonly referred to internally as the “Box” PM. I have been in this role since arriving to Microsoft last September, my working career before MS was spent in France.

The Release PM role is quite an interesting role in that your focus is not primarily on a technology area but more so, on the wider arena of ensuring that your product ships, of excellent quality, ships on time, and meets each of the scheduling milestones and requirements of that milestone. A lot of collaboration work is required within the VS DATA team itself, with all the other Visual Studio teams and with external VS teams such as Yukon and Longhorn etc. There are quite a lot of other areas that the release PM works on but the main priority is to ensure that VS features make it into the “box” in excellent condition.