PPT can be found @

https://cid-0c5963e0b1a0be5d.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/PM%20Talk.ppt 

Let me know what you think of it.

Update 7/30/2009

This post has been moved to https://www.balionweb.com/my-pm-talk-in-sjtu.html

Entities

First of all, let us keep in mind that tasks are actually what IWs really care about. They are much happier if they can complete assigned task without touching emails. Right? Completion of tasks is what they are trying to achieve. Second, when they have to communicate, they care about distilled information they are expecting while writing/reading emails. You will not get any additional credit through presenting your idea by writing a poem. Senders and recipients come last. Without them, communication can't happen. These two entities get lower priorities because if distilled information can be gained by other means, say search engine or anonymous DL, who cares them?

Again - email for IWs is all about tasks, not messages. This is the most fundamental philosophy differentiating Pmail's design from others.

Problems - an abused tool in workplace

By nature, current email systems allow one sends anything to any number of persons at anytime anywhere. Gradually it turns out true that something that can be anything can do nothing actually. Theoretically any email should be of your interest; otherwise sender will not send it to you. Realistically it is so easy to be over-used:

• Email overload. You might probably find everyone around you is complaining about too many emails. Doubt? Open you email clients, see how many unread mails you have. NY Times reports, E-MAIL has become the bane of some people's professional lives. This occurs likely because of complicated job nature, but I'd say often it is actually because of poor email prioritization. Can you easily tell which email is much more important than others? Or emails tell its priority to you?
• Hard to map emails to one's day-to-day jobs. How many times you have to search your emails to dig certain messages out because you need something?
• Mail thread discussions often go wild. Do you find you are in trouble figuring out what is going on when suddenly looped in a thread?

At a glance

Pmail's primary design goal is to help team get jobs done efficiently – under right timing, priorities, order and resources. Everyone would have a clear picture about how his work contributes to team success.

Pmail would also aim to minimize communications as much as possible. Leave users alone please. In task-centered email design, all emails will fall into one of below four categories:

Pros and Cons

Why bother to build global development team?

• New talents pool – Software development needs so many persons with similar attributes. In Microsoft Company wide, top 3 hiring criteria are smart, passion for technology and fit to company values such as openness, continual self-improvement and mutual respect, etc. From various studies, supply of talented IT staffers isn't keeping up with demand. And it won't change anytime soon. Even when Microsoft is cutting 5000 jobs now, we still have another 2000~3000 job openings there. What to do if enough qualified hires can be not found within US? Go outside.
• Lower cost – let us straightly go to data. Annual pay for Level "59" is about $74,000 in US, while same level is paid about $20,000(~RMB150K equally) in China. Another slight fact - It costs about $1.5 to go most common places in Shanghai…
• Close to market – Most innovative ideas often comes out of interactions with customers. And customers' requirements vary from country to country. So best way to serve a local market is to be in the market.
• Specific knowledge – Cross-nation acquisition for specific technologies is another reason to build global development. You can't(or not able to) move all folks to HQ.

Like many other things, challenges always go with benefits hand in hand. You can't take only part of it. Fair enough.

1. Distance – People who work on the same software can't work alone, they have to exchange information and make decisions. Less than 3 minutes conversation is often enough for slight but frequently arising communication needs, for example, "Could you show me the bug in your environment?" Distance makes it impossible to stop by one's office. Network bandwidth is another issue introduced by distance. Why it matters? Suppose one team has to copy large file sets from another remote team daily, it would be a problem. The file sets can be growing amazingly big – for example, daily SQL Server build is about 300GB.
2. Time zone – Would communication a real headache since modern technologies such as email and telephone have been there for quite a long time? But the things are no one is there when you are working due to time zone. You have to wait another day to get an email response. When you rush to office to check it, the most frustrating but concise reply could be - "What do you mean by <insert anything you assume others should understand>? How can I help you?"
3. Culture/Language – Master level of English is unbalanced in global teams. There are dozens of ways to say "A beats B" in English, but only several of them are understandable for general public; dialect is another obstacle. For example, Chinese folks often have hard time pronouncing letter "L", as a result, words like "girl" might sound weird sometimes.
4. Junior team – In my organization, most hires right come out of college. We are raw smart, but less experienced. It is hard to deny that some key ingredients for great engineers just take time – design skills, debugging techniques, influencing capabilities. This is not a cutting-corner example.
5. Conflicts between hierarchical management and local branding – By organization hierarchy definition, many business units have existence in China. STB, Live, Online Service, etc. They functions nearly independently of each other and reports to US. But from the perspective of customers/partners/talents, it looks a bit confusing because there are so many Microsoft's. 
6. People development – folks in remote sites are not equally exposed to development resources such as face-to-face training, library, mentors, etc.
7. Governing issue – due to well known concerns, something confidential can't be moved out of US.

How-to

There are several factors playing critical role in deciding appropriate distributed development model. At least you should consider project type, team seniority, team size, team culture, communication cost and history.

• Build trust first. No matter how adaptable a new team is, it always takes time to fit into a specific team culture. So starting with easy jobs to build team moral and credibility is the safest steps before moving forward. Beyond this, the new team can target increased ownership.
• Decide on team coupling level. From highest to lowest, the level could be: pseudo random assignment, same branch same feature/component, same branch different feature/component, different sub branch but same main branch, different main branch & clearly defined data contract. Avoid circular dependency.
• Come up with communication plan. Minimized communication is not always the best, especially for relatively junior teams. The best way to develop people is to work with senior folks on daily basis as much as possible. So you have to make tradeoffs here based on various inputs.
• Shared lab if possible. If you have to copy large files across the ocean frequently, consider doing your job on a lab down in remote team. If you have to do copying, make sure the files meet most critical quality requirements before doing so, for example, a build verification test.
• People development plan. Regular staff exchanging plan such as Marco Polo and Silk Road program, getting a mentor, record trainings, etc.
• Local brand management. Externally shown as one image; internally run by functionality as usual.

Origin

Hulu, an online video streaming company, managed to do something which YouTube failed to do. Copyright is one of YouTube’s headaches, but it is incredible positive thing for Hulu, because it is built intentionally aimed to server property content by two major stream media dogs, NBC Universal and Fox.

{YouTube, watch someone’s DIY video} VS { Hulu, watch TV & Movies online legally} -> Similar but different market niche.

People might be asking, why NBC and Fox executives don’t rely on YouTube to serve their plays? You can imagine following conversation which probably happened behind the scene:

NBC/Fox:	Hey, YouTube, are you interested in serving my video to the world?
YouTube:	Why not.  Let’s sit down and take a look at this. Now we are owned by Google, and we are overwhelming dominator in online video market. We have great brand. We have great infrastructure. We have most talented engineers. Blabla… (down to the point) so you have to pay x dollar for every minute show.
NBC/Fox(think):	uh-um… let me do some math here. Plan A is to work with YouTube, plan B is to build up something myself. In next 3-5 years, if everything goes as predicted, plan B will bring much more money to our shareholders than plan A, and less risky.
YouTube(ping NBC/Fox):	What do you think of the plan?
NBC/Fox:	Nice plan, but no, thanks.

This is the first site who delivers property video to your computer for free.  Traditional Media Company gradually realized that they have to embrace the changes if they are not able to prevent them. It is online streaming, in this case. Hulu has more than 120 sources now.

Key is property content sources are nonrenewable rare resources.

Independence

Hulu’s CEO said to capital angels, “I don't think you'll be seeing the name Fox or NBC on the site hardly at all, Hulu is about the shows, not the networks. The shows are the brands that users care about." Another quote, “the key to Hulu's success is its freedom to operate essentially as a stand-alone company…”

From startup’s perspective, captical can be good thing, or bad thing. It can help you grow much faster, but it can also easily enable you miss your initial goals. Capital often appoints some seemingly smart guy, who is with XYZ MBA degree or n years of experience in ABC company, to take over the company as one of its investment agreements.

That is indeed one of the worst investment risk controls, although it happens again and again. Give money to most passionate guys, and letting them be passionate always is the only way to maximize the probability of getting most out of your investment.

Feature?Solution? Experience!

Question: If you are given a task to build a video streaming site within less than 3 months, what would you do?

We were taught this way:

1)      Identify who will be using your site

2)      Draw use case diagram

3)      List scenarios for each user role

4)      To support each scenarios, figure out needed features

5)      Design/Code/test your features

6)      Go live

7)      Yeah! Party! :- )

If you follow this in your next interview, I can almost guarantee a pass. Do we miss anything? Actually we missed most critical one – Experience! Experience is a combination of brand/feeling/easy-to-use/enjoyable process. For example, given below requirement:

"Design something which is used to sit on, commonly for use by one person. It often has the seat raised above floor level, supported by legs."

People will respond immediately, "Chair!". You may notice that there are at least hundreds of types of chairs in the world, if not thousands of, if not millions of. Only most imaginative ones who deeply understand that particular set of users’ needs, care about their feelings and eventually apply those into product designs can do the best work. Let us take a look at "art of chair".

Be COOL, in show time, although you might have the similar hard time figuring out what some of them really are. :-) Just like someone said about iTune – “iTune is not selling features. iTune is selling experience.”

Hulu’s key experiences:

1)      Simple

2)      Larger screen

3)      High-resolution video

4)      Clutter-free

5)      Quality control

6)      Free to users

7)      No download

8)      Obsessed with users

In the diagram, group manager often runs a team owning individual components or feature areas, say, one spell checker DLL in office; a product unit manager owns a product, say Outlook; while a general manager runs a product family, say Office. One compelling advantage Microsoft possesses is that its products are designed to work together seamlessly. For example, in a recent CIO.com article, 10 Reasons to Use Microsoft Outlook for Your Company's E-Mail, 8 of 10 points is actually about interoperability with other software.

Managers define strategy, Developers write code, testers test code, what do PMs do? Well, it is really hard to define - there is even no consensus within Microsoft. However, one thing is clear – PMs do anything except coding(unless they have to :-) to drive projects meeting strategic goals. Enable right things get done right. Figure out gaps and fill them. The role is something like concrete among brick walls. (cartoons on the right)

If you take a look at PM's position, blocks with black bold border, in the organization hierarchy, you will get the challenges here. PMs are supposed to lead their peers to work towards the right direction.

"You are not my boss. Why do I have to listen to you?"

This question gets down the topic of "Lead without Authority". Before you read along, I have to clarify that I am not a PM expert, but I (0) I've been a PM for quite a while, (1) work with great PMs, (2) learn and try most fundamental things which work well, (3) I faced similar situations for many many times, either in schools, or various organizations. Here is my sharing.

• Charisma. You might be incredibly raw smart – you can optimize an algorithm from O(N*N*N) down to O(logN), or you might be able to design a system of .9999 availability, extremely secure, and super cheap compared with competitors… That doesn't mean you can be a good leader. Instead, many of the best leaders, however, will point to the fact that they were "C" students(From Source). 
• Credibility. It is the key to make people follow you. It works like stock value – hard to build, easy to lose. Be careful of it always. Do right things right. Bring something valuable to the team. Your credibility will accumulate gradually. Do what you say, and say what you mean.
• Consistency. People hated to be randomized. Don't always change directions. Clear goal.
• Partnership mentality. Low ego.
• Help others great. Most influences are indirect. People often complain about "over-managed, but less supported". (Check out photo on the right)
• Lead by showing, not lead by talking only. Get your hands a bit dirty. Leaders should be willing to do anything they tell their reports to do. Show domo, mock UI, prototypes to other when presenting a new way to do things.
• Has sense of people. Most basic thing is How to Win Friends and Influence People. Learn to inspire people. Always be positive in every aspect.
• Communicate. Communicate. Communicate. Listen. Ask questions. You can be introverts, but have to be proactive. Be transparent. Understand your audience – strength, weakness, style, and figure out most effective approaches.
• Relationships enhance communication. Invest time in talking to people interactively. When you need to request advice, an opinion, or a task, you can talk to people from a healthy and positive place.
• Sharpen your vision. Look around. Look ahead. This helps in making sound decisions.
• Start to drive teams with strong pseudo leaders
  • Talk to them especially leaders or submarine leaders, get to know what are their likes/dislikes, Ask: How can I help you guys? Win their support.
  • Build credibility. Bring something invaluable to the team, for example, build up strong relationships with a partner team, present a competitor research report, improve team visibility
  • Before making changes, present it to the leaders in private, say 1on1, to reach rough consensus before it goes public.
  • Help others great. Let them get the credit.
• Conflict Management
  • Focus on goals, not conflicts themselves. Not a question of smart or dumb. 
  • If you can control your emotion well enough, 25% of conflicts will go away.
  • Overwhelming majority of conflicts is just because of perspectives and different values. Try to figure out stories of other people's side. People often come to the same solution when presented same set of information. Use negotiation tips. Keep win-win in mind.
  • In worst case – when you have to resolve unavoidable conflicts, say 5 pies for 10 kids, make sure put a fair decision-making system in place, which is often a engineering way.
• You can reward desired performance even without authority
  • Promotions, raises, bonuses are not in your list, but you can affect them in indirect ways
  • Fame. Complimenting an employee on a job well done at a staff meeting or in front of company officers can be extremely rewarding
  • Increased trust. For example, give top performers the freedom to work in a more self-directed manner.

“Hi Bill,

I noticed that you were never able to plug the Lake Quincy Media ad tags into your site. Are you still interested in earning revenue from displaying ads targeted to Microsoft developers? If so, you can get your tags from here: <certain link> 

Let me know if you have any questions or if you’ve decided against running the ads and I’ll set your account to inactive for you.”

I even forgot that I resgistered in their site. To encourage such great customer service, I go ahead to try how the AD really works for me; finally decide to put a small square in the side bar. You can easily find it now if you scroll down a bit and pay attention to the left side bar. Let us see how many dollars I can make after one or two quarters. By putting an AD to the blog, it looks more of-the-business, doesn’t it? Of course, you can bid for that AD position. :- )

Update(2/26/2009)

The AD is disabled temporarily due to security alert.

Stories 

#1: One of my team mates lost his Outlook email archive due to a mistaken operation. He is very upset because all of his emails in past two years are gone, unrecoverablly. Suggested Outlook mail file is 2GB, but people can easily drive it up to 10GB and often notice this too late. As what he said in MSN signature, “my archive, 555…”

#2: While I was browsing one of my favorite bloggers – Brad Abrams’s blog, ran into a shocking post, Help! My hard disk crashed. He can afford a new disk, but he need the data – especially “the pictures of the kids recent birthday party”. In the comments, people suggested various ways to recover it, unfortunately looks like no luck.

This leads to the most basic questions: why people don’t backup data even if they know they are in the risk of losing them? Probably because of:

1)      The chance is very tiny

2)      Current backup solutions are not “good enough”

For 1), although it might be true, but remember the result might be cataclysmic. Let us take a look at what is going on about 2).

Existing Backup Solutions

Traditional C/S – Most of current backup solutions are based on traditional C/S architecture. Assume one use 40% of 500GB disk drive on average; it is still a big capacity for enterprise with thousands of staff. Backup time is also another concern. Let me illustrate this with some math. For a backup server with two 1-Gbit NICs, its max throughput is about 200MB. If backup window(people are sleeping) is 10 hours, it means it can back up about 7.2TB(2*100*3600*10MB) data. Obviously it is hardly scalable along with business expansion.

Online backup – People can turn to AWS S3, or Azure SQL Data Services to simplify things on their own side. But this doesn’t make things even better if you look at current network speed. Calculating data is much easier than moving data around.

My P2P Backup System

p2p backup comes with several inherent advantages in handy:

1)      No additional hardware expense. People often have at least 30% capacity left; we can leverage that for backup space.

2)      No obvious network bottleneck.

Some people might also list “no single point of failure”, but that is not true. Let us take a look at how BT works, a general P2P network.

Basically here are what happens in P2P network - peers need talk to a central coordination server(i.e., Tracker in BT system) to get info about other peers, and then talk to individual peers about real data exchange. These two steps are essential. Single Point of Failure(SPOF) can happen in the coordination server. You may argue that you can enhance its reliability by techniques like mirroring, but does it look like over-heavyweight? We have many reliable services running by full time IT guys, why do we bother to re-invent the wheel? Several services can be utilized, such as AD, Sharepoint, exchange, which allow customized data writing. Data needed written into a central place would be:

1)      Peer list by <IP, port>

2)      Other meta data such as backup network name, Software RAID level

Of course, we need do compression, encryption, incremental backup, scheduled backup in the solution. I may do investigation later and update the post.

Also see other backup solutions

https://www.storegrid.com/index.html - select a folder, then backup, traditional

www.streamload.com - Large net disk, Upload your files to streamload, then view it, or email it to someone else.

https://www.beinsync.com/ - Access you computer: install a mini PHP web server onto it.

https://base.google.com/base/about.html - In about 15 minutes, your item will have a unique web address and be visible to the world.

There are many reasons to leak memory. In addition to calling unmanaged code from managed code, another one of general cases is about event handler. If you do this:

     Foo.FooEvent += new EventHandler(MemoryLeaksHere.Method);

When you complete using MemoryLeaksHere, but you are still using Foo, then MemoryLeaksHere will still remain alive as well. MemoryLeaksHere object will leak memory as a result of failing to GC.

Let us take a look at one simple example first.

In MemoryLeaksHere object’s constructor, Foo starts to hold a reference to MemoryLeaksHere by registering event handler. In MemoryLeaksHere.TryQuit(), if we don't unregister, memory leak will happen.

To be more intuitive, you can copy/paste sample code to VS2008, and then enable unmanged code debugging by following:

Project->Properties->Debug->Enable Unmanaged Code debugging

Now set a breakpoint at “Check memory leak here”, and start build/debug. When being asked leak me or not, you can choose either yes or no. For example:

Here, looks like we leak two of them. Finally app will hit the breakpoint and stop. At this point, we can go to VS immedate window to load sos.dll, and then check how many objects in the heap:

So now we know there are two object instances are not recycled. Why are they not GC-ed? Because someone has a reference to them. Choose one of them, and use gcroot command.

Now we can see that MemoryLeakSample.Foo is still referencing MemoryLeakSample.MemoryLeaksHere via event handler. If it is not 5 iterations, image what would happen if every incoming request results in a slice of memory leak... Soon or later, you online service will be down.

See also:

https://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/Memory_Leak_Detection.aspx

https://blogs.msdn.com/jgoldb/archive/2008/02/04/finding-memory-leaks-in-wpf-based-applications.aspx

https://blogs.msdn.com/calvin_hsia/archive/2008/04/11/8381838.aspx

https://www.automatedqa.com/techpapers/net_allocation_profiler.asp

https://blogs.msdn.com/greg_schechter/archive/2004/05/27/143605.aspx

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So, the final thing will look like this: