I usually don’t tell people my job title when they ask what I do. Something about “Program Manager” just doesn’t seem to resonate with many people outside of industries that use that title, or Microsoft in particular. If pressed, I usually fall back on less specific phrases like “Software Engineer” or my personal favorite “I help make Mac software for Microsoft.” The latter description seems to evoke the most colorful reactions of the bunch, and it’s probably the most accessible one-phrase description that I can offer to those outside my chosen profession, but it’s also perhaps the least specific job description that I have for myself.

So what does it mean to be a Program Manager in the Macintosh Business Unit?

First off, the word “manager” in my job title is a bit of a red herring. Unlike my manager, I don’t manage anybody except sometimes myself. That said, I do manage multiple interdependent projects (which, in my case, generally include various features of Office for Mac), and I do make prioritization and resource allocation decisions, so taken together that does approach at least one definition of program management.

I am a software engineer by background and I practice program management as a member of the engineering team that produces Office for Mac. Part of my role on that team is to be accountable for things getting done. (Again, “things” here are usually various features of Office for Mac.) I don’t always engineer those things myself – we have Software Development Engineers who do that for software features – but that’s not to say that I don’t do anything at all (though some of our Software Development Engineers might say that… purely in jest, or so they say). I don’t write the code (anymore), but I do help ensure the right code is written.

A big part of what I do is information synthesis. We’ve got business people and senior management who tell me where they want our products to be, engineers who tell me where they can take our product to, and customers who, well… who sometimes frankly just tell me where they think our product can go, and my job is to synthesize all that input and create a single output which is a cohesive vision for where our product will actually be… and then it’s my job to take it there. This is probably the part of my job that I find both the most challenging and the most rewarding.

I find that an analogy to the role of a film producer (and arguably “line producer” in particular) can also be helpful in describing the role of the Program Manager in the Macintosh Business Unit. Just as a film producer creates the conditions in which a film can be successfully made, so too do I in my role as Program Manager help create the conditions in which Office for Mac is produced. Specific activities that I perform in this capacity include understanding our customer needs and designing software experiences that address those needs, as well as ensuring internal resources and juggling priorities to enable those experiences can be effectively engineered.

I’ll give an example to help illustrate a bit of what I do.

There was a point last year at which it became clear that we would not be able to include a ‘selection’ object in the AppleScript dictionary for PowerPoint 2008. If you are one of the many Office for Mac customers who care about the PowerPoint AppleScript dictionary then a ‘selection’ object is very likely to be one of your highest concerns: It is quite literally impossible to write scripts that operate on the presentation document’s current selection without such an object; entire categories of potentially useful, time-saving, or even mission-critical scripts would not be possible.

I lobbied hard to get an AppleScript ‘selection’ object done for PowerPoint 2008, but in the end I had to agree that it really did not make sense to complete that work at that time. But we knew that this feature would be important to important customers and so I was able to generate support for a plan where we would complete the AppleScript ‘selection’ work for PowerPoint immediately after Office 2008 was released.

Even then, AppleScript ‘selection’ proved to be large chunk of effort to complete. We knew it would be, so I worked with stakeholders to prioritize the subset of this feature that would be most important to customers who need this functionality. We completed this subset and delivered it to customers in Office for Mac version 12.1.0 just a few months after Office 2008 for Mac first released.

If you have Office 2008 for Mac today and you keep it up to date with the latest updates then you can script PowerPoint using a reasonably full-featured ‘selection’ object in AppleScript. We intend to finish out the rest of the ‘selection’ implementation in a later release, but my team and I are confident that the AppleScript dictionary available with 12.1.0 will suffice for a vast majority of interested customers. If that’s not your experience, let me know!

So what does it mean to be a Program Manager in the Macintosh Business Unit? Well, in my case it means that I love my job! For real. I get to work with some of the best, brightest, and most experienced Mac developers on the planet and together we get to define and deliver software that millions of people use and rely on every day. I think that’s a pretty cool job description.