Pivotal Moments with John Lam

Harris Syed defied conventional wisdom in his unlikely journey from Pakistan to the Partner band at Microsoft.

Rong is a PM Manager at Microsoft and a 16+ year veteran of Developer Division. This is the story of her journey from engineer to PM to PM Manager, and from China to the United States.

Jill shares with us her story of resilience and grit that leads to her current position as a Senior UX Designer at Microsoft. Jill turned the disappointment of being fired from her first job in industrial design into a successful career designing some of the most complex user interfaces at Microsoft.

Tim Heuer is a Principal PM Manager at Microsoft. A 17 year veteran of the company, Tim shares with us some pivotal moments in his life: getting healthier, transitioning from evangelism to product, moving and getting re-org'd at the company, becoming a people manager, and creating a healthy work-life balance.

Looking back at the interviews with my first 9 guests through the lens of Change, Trying the Job on for Size, and Mistakes.

Larry Osterman is a Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft, and he's been here for over 37 years! In a career that starts with MS-DOS and continues today with Azure, Larry has seen it all and shares not only his stories, but the accumulated wisdom he has gained in his distinguished career.

Sid Unnithan is an early in career Program Manager 2 on my team whose career spans both Windows and the Python team in DevDiv. We talk about the importance of having autonomy in your job. How product building is a team sport, how to deal with negativity from others and how to interview to move laterally within the company.

Dustin Campbell is a Principal Software Development engineer at Microsoft who's been working on .NET developer tooling for the past 15 years. He's also a jazz guitarist, a reformed spam tools creator and an escapee from a software sweatshop in Las Vegas.

Jeffrey is a graduate of the co-op program at the University of Waterloo. In his 3 years at Microsoft, he has shipped the Jupyter Notebooks in VS Code experience, partnered with Facebook on PyTorch tooling, and is building a brand new data wrangling experience in VS Code.

Sharon Xu is a Program Manager on the Python Team at Microsoft, holder of a degree in Engineering and Business from the University of Western Ontario in Canada, and a retired currency trader.