During my many years at Sun, I was fortunate to work with many talented individuals, many of whom got together to form a kickass team and pretty cool service. This is my recommendation for Tai-Wei (aka David) Lin.
David was one of the first engineers on the Sun Software Library (aka Project O'Malley) team, joining a grassroots effort to first prove the idea then work on implementation. David has taken on many different engineering roles during the project lifecycle, constantly and successfully learning new technologies and approaches on demand, all in the spirit of helping the team in any way possible, regardless of personal considerations. During this project, David demonstrated his ability to learn and adapt quickly, as well as lead a development effort through complex and ever changing technologies.
Initially, David took on implementation responsibilities for the user interface. During the project inception phases, as the effort evolved from vague ideas to concreteness, the UI needed to constantly change as well. The project also had technology requirements to develop a Rich Internet Application (RIA) user interface, using somewhat modern but not yet fully mature Web development technologies - JavaScript and Ajax. At the time (mid 2006), development and testing tools for these technologies were quite primitive and immature. To demonstrate the feasibility of RIA technologies and help refine our stakeholders' ideas, David successfully build several different user interfaces - exploring different look and feels as well as analyzing alternative JavaScript and Ajax based software libraries: Yahoo YUI Library, Dojo, JSF, Ext JS, and jQuery. Ultimately, the project settled on Ext JS. David never complained about all the work that was discarded, viewing it as a learning experience, both for him as an individual, and for the project as a whole.
David never hesitated to try new technologies (a must with the quickly evolving Web based RIA user interfaces), and develop tools as necessary. For example, at one point during our development cycles, our startup performance was abysmal. David took the time to truly understand the core of the problem (some would say this is the hardest part), find a way to measure the issue (so he could actually be sure that he's improving the performance), search for existing solutions, implement what he found, then shared it via various webinars, forum postings, and blog entries.
After the project was established and fully funded, David demonstrated his leadership skills by leading the Web UI development team - he took on this responsibility simply because there was a need, not because he was asked to do it. He helped tackle complex technical issues, set direction for implementation, and assisted new team members onto the team, mentoring them as necessary to ensure they become successful. Ultimately, David's efforts paid off. Our engineering VP and primary executive sponsor called the Web UI a "pretty slick UI" - publicly
complimenting the work.
Time management and priority management are also David's strengths. While he was busy implementing various aspects Project O'Malley, David attended the local Toast Master's club, and began studying almost full time for his MBA. He also applied many of the concepts he learned at business school on the project: at one point, during a conflict with our users over approach, he mediated among the different parties, helping reach a reasonable compromise.
David is highly intelligent, dedicated, works extremely hard, and would make a very successful team lead and/or group manager. I highly recommend him.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Recommendation for Parnian Taidi
During my many years at Sun, I was fortunate to work with many talented individuals, many of whom got together to form a kickass team and pretty cool service. This is a recommendation for Parnian Taidi, one of the best product managers.
Parnian and I first started collaborating on Project O'Malley in the summer of 2007, during the project's initial brainstorming phases. Parnian presented our ISV and partner user community (the customer in Agile terminology), whereas I represented product engineering. Parnian demonstrated strong understanding of the problems experienced by the 3rd party users, and was able to articulate them clearly. Parnian's strength during these sessions, however, was her ability to interact with engineers who were scoping out the effort, and accurately represent our users' interests in evaluating options and prioritizing features based on rough level of effort estimates quickly, made the planning sessions quite productive. Along with Parnian's constant involvement, the team was able to prototype the concept and present to the stakeholders.
During the next 2+ years that we collaborated on the Sun Software Library, Parnian was an exceptional partner. Initially, we were tasked with building the Sun Software Library and getting the first revision implemented and deployed. Parnian was a quick learner, leveraging her technical background to help bridge the gap between what the users need versus what is actually feasible in a given timeframe. The engineering team enjoyed collaborating closely with Parnian, since she was able to translate and express the end users' issues in both terms that the engineers understood, and level of detail that the engineers wanted. When the engineering team faced an issue or problem that needed clarification, Parnian quickly learned the details, and either resolved it herself enabling the engineers to get back to work, or clearly communicate it to the users on behalf of the engineering team. This formed a strong bond of trust between the engineers and the product manager.
Once the Sun Software Library was launched, Parnian demonstrated wisdom creativity in spending a limited marketing budget to promote the site: Wisdom in using non-traditional (by Sun's standards) web 2.0 centric marketing tactics with no support from other Sun marketing organizations (blogs, twitter, facebook, forum postings on developer sites, etc.), as well as more traditional marketing approaches, such as presenting at conferences, staffing conference booths with giveaways, and so on. As a result of her efforts, the Sun Software Library usage has increased substantially (well over 2000% growth during the first few months) during the first year.
Parnian demonstrated a positive attitude to roll up her sleeves and take on responsibilities outside of her job description. A successful site, in order to build up a user community, requires a constant dialog with users. Although our executives committed resources for this activity, those resources never materialized. Realizing that our users would not be successful without this, Parnian took on this responsibility, in addition to her normal responsibilities.
In making the Sun Software Library a successful program, Parnian also demonstrated attention to the details. She routinely reviewed all the metrics (and was able to recite many of them from memory on demand during ad hoc hallway conversations, which is very necessary to turn skeptics into supporters), and constantly asked for new metrics and refinements of existing metrics, so she could better understand what it was being used for, and how it was being used. She also continued collaborating closely with the engineering team, spending many hours reviewing progress and making constant suggestions on user interface design and workflow.
In summary, through her dedication to the effort, hard work, participation at the ground level, and always supportive and positive attitude, Parnian earned the trust and respect of the engineering team. As a product manager, she is one of the best ones I've worked with. I recommend her highly.
Parnian and I first started collaborating on Project O'Malley in the summer of 2007, during the project's initial brainstorming phases. Parnian presented our ISV and partner user community (the customer in Agile terminology), whereas I represented product engineering. Parnian demonstrated strong understanding of the problems experienced by the 3rd party users, and was able to articulate them clearly. Parnian's strength during these sessions, however, was her ability to interact with engineers who were scoping out the effort, and accurately represent our users' interests in evaluating options and prioritizing features based on rough level of effort estimates quickly, made the planning sessions quite productive. Along with Parnian's constant involvement, the team was able to prototype the concept and present to the stakeholders.
During the next 2+ years that we collaborated on the Sun Software Library, Parnian was an exceptional partner. Initially, we were tasked with building the Sun Software Library and getting the first revision implemented and deployed. Parnian was a quick learner, leveraging her technical background to help bridge the gap between what the users need versus what is actually feasible in a given timeframe. The engineering team enjoyed collaborating closely with Parnian, since she was able to translate and express the end users' issues in both terms that the engineers understood, and level of detail that the engineers wanted. When the engineering team faced an issue or problem that needed clarification, Parnian quickly learned the details, and either resolved it herself enabling the engineers to get back to work, or clearly communicate it to the users on behalf of the engineering team. This formed a strong bond of trust between the engineers and the product manager.
Once the Sun Software Library was launched, Parnian demonstrated wisdom creativity in spending a limited marketing budget to promote the site: Wisdom in using non-traditional (by Sun's standards) web 2.0 centric marketing tactics with no support from other Sun marketing organizations (blogs, twitter, facebook, forum postings on developer sites, etc.), as well as more traditional marketing approaches, such as presenting at conferences, staffing conference booths with giveaways, and so on. As a result of her efforts, the Sun Software Library usage has increased substantially (well over 2000% growth during the first few months) during the first year.
Parnian demonstrated a positive attitude to roll up her sleeves and take on responsibilities outside of her job description. A successful site, in order to build up a user community, requires a constant dialog with users. Although our executives committed resources for this activity, those resources never materialized. Realizing that our users would not be successful without this, Parnian took on this responsibility, in addition to her normal responsibilities.
In making the Sun Software Library a successful program, Parnian also demonstrated attention to the details. She routinely reviewed all the metrics (and was able to recite many of them from memory on demand during ad hoc hallway conversations, which is very necessary to turn skeptics into supporters), and constantly asked for new metrics and refinements of existing metrics, so she could better understand what it was being used for, and how it was being used. She also continued collaborating closely with the engineering team, spending many hours reviewing progress and making constant suggestions on user interface design and workflow.
In summary, through her dedication to the effort, hard work, participation at the ground level, and always supportive and positive attitude, Parnian earned the trust and respect of the engineering team. As a product manager, she is one of the best ones I've worked with. I recommend her highly.
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