Julie: Live Search Profile

Search Program Manager

What have you learned so far during your time on search?

I've learned technical and non-technical things. On the technical side, I've been learning all about distributed systems (file systems & execution environments), cutting edge multimedia research, and the internal workings of a search engine (crawlers, parsers, builders, operational model, and such). On the non-technical side I think I've been learning most from the experiences I've been exposed to. I've driven a number of different exec reviews, talked with customers and experts in the field of search, and have numerous different dealings with external companies wishing to partner with us. All of this has been incredibly interesting, and from it I am trying to develop my communication, strategic thinking, innovation fostering, and questioning skills. The main reason why I wanted to come to search was to be challenged and learn, so all of these experiences have been really great for that.

What cool new features are you working on? Why are they important to customers?

I'm working on some of the coolest stuff I can imagine. The three main things I'm driving are multimedia search, data warehousing and analysis and setting up a framework for incubations. Multimedia search is great because it's such a rich space and there is so little there today in search. The number of times that I have gone to Live, Google or Yahoo image search and not found what I wanted is ridiculous. The only way I ever find cool videos is if I get them emailed or IM'd to me through my social network somewhere. I can't ever access a random TV show I want to watch online, let alone get them from my TV, like I ought to be able to. On demand and Tivo are good starting tools, but we can and will do much, much better. I get to help make those fundamental changes happen. That's cool. With the data mining and analysis projects I get to learn about large scale warehousing, distributed computing and execution, and dive really, really deep into who are users actually are. I think that the work my team is doing with data warehouse and analysis will be one of the fundamental keys in helping us compete large scale, long term, head-to-head with Google. The incubation component is also incredibly valuable and exciting. My role here is making it possible for our team to rapidly incubate and get things out to customers. With all of the exceptionally creative ideas flying around search these days, we need a place to actually build them and get them to our users; I get to build that bridge. Again, very cool.

When it comes to a creative working environment, what's important for you?

A bunch of things spring to mind ... I'll narrow it to three. First of all, it's really important for me to have really, really supportive leadership way up the chain. I've been really impressed in Search with how exceptional the leaders of our team are; it makes an enormous difference to feel allowance, desire and expectation for creativity. Second, I think it's important to be surrounded by people who think creatively. It's just cool to be having a hallway conversation when someone come up, pitches an idea, and then we spend the next hour or so sketching it out on the board and wrestling with the hard problems of it. So the people are important. And I suppose third is team flexibility. Throughout the time I've been on search I've seen a number of people's ideas take physical form just because the person said that she wanted to take the time to work on it. Because Search is flexible as a team and just trying to do it the right thing, it allows for people who are interested and passionate to take their work time to develop creative ideas.