Brian Houck Email and Phone Number

As a Productivity Engineer at Microsoft, my mission is to enhance the wellbeing and productivity of our engineering teams by driving insights derived from formal research.I've been a key contributor to "EngThrive", Microsoft's implementation of the SPACE framework, which measures and improves developer productivity through a unified analytics approach and supporting business processes.I study the technical, cultural, and environmental factors affecting the long-term happiness and productivity of our developers, program managers, and data scientists. My role includes regularly briefing our senior leadership team to drive company-wide change by providing insights and recommendations.Collaborating with researchers across the industry, and using a blend of research methods, I regularly publish my work, which is some of the most read in the industry.My passion is in humanizing the workplace, and I'm committed to creating productive workspaces that adapt to the changing dynamics of the modern workplace. Together, we're shaping the future of productivity and work culture at Microsoft.

I led the Windows Developer Experiences PM team, and it our mission was to increase the productivity of internal Microsoft developers by improving the tools they use their development work. My team designed and built developer tooling to remove inefficiencies in daily workflows of developers contributing to the Windows source. We modernized the Windows developer experience by transitioning our engineering system from a set of separate client tools, to a unified experience built around VS/VS Code. This work yielded an 8% increase in the efficiency of our developers by delivering a toolset that decreases costly context changes, and provides better inner loop integration. Not only were our developers able to accomplish more with this increased efficiency, but we measured a sustained 15% increase in Engineering System satisfaction. We accomplished this by building a deep understanding of our customers and their daily pain points, and developing tools that successfully addressed their specific challenges.

I led the Release team within the Windows Engineering Systems group.The Release team was responsible for releasing Windows Client, Server, and IoT to our external customers and partners. We designed, implemented, and deployed a set of Azure cloud services to process and deploy builds of Windows to a variety of endpoints that different external audiences could download from. By automating what was historically a set of manual processes, we reduced the time it takes to process builds by more than 99%. The scalable power of the Cloud allowed us to increase our throughput by over 2500%, all while significantly decreasing our operating costs.

I led the Windows Device Group - Customer Engagement team, a multidisciplinary team (PM, Test, and Dev) that built structured programs to engage with customers across multiple segments (Enterprise, Education, and Consumer). The goal of these engagements was to provide a channel to receive early responses on feature planning and strategic direction, gather actionable feedback on existing products, and to get validation on in-development products. My teams' responsibilities included working with our legal department to generate the right framework agreements, partnering with marketing to recruit participants into our programs, developing tools for gathering feedback and telemetry, as well as designing and deploying reports that make any received data actionable within the Engineering System.

World-Readiness is the idea that all Windows experiences should feel tailored for our users, regardless of where our users live; and which languages they speak. International users should have UI displayed in a format they prefer; with relevant, local, content. They should be able to input in a way that feels natural, and seamless. They shouldn’t have to sacrifice usability, and features to use Windows in their preferred languages. The World-Readiness Test Team partners with feature teams across Windows to make sure those ideals get implemented. Windows release in 108 languages, spanning 269 markets. 95% of the Earth’s population lives outside the United States. Our ability to satisfy the demands of our international customers is critical to the continued success of Microsoft. My teams' role is to develop guidelines, requirements, training, tools and sample test collateral to enable feature teams to deliver exception international experiences. We have a particular focus on validating complete end-to-end experiences, and ensuring that integration problems don't break scenarios.

The Windows International Test (WIT) team is in charge of ensuring that the user-experience for non-English (US) customers feels natural, fluid, and enjoyable. The WIT team works to ensure the user-experience works correctly for all 108 Windows languages.I worked primarily on the tools / infrastructure team; which was tasked with trying to automatically identify and analyze localized screenshots of Windows UI. I developed an image analysis algorithm to detect text on a screen, and to identify which Font was used to render it. This could then be used to determine if localized text was truncated, or displayed incorrectly. The code was written primarily in C++ for performance reasons, with API's exposed in C# for test code to call into.

Windows CardSpace was a client application that allowed users to provide a digital identity to a relying party. Identifies could be self-issued, or issued via an identify provider. CardSpace was built on top of the Web Services Protocol Stack, using WS-Security, WS-Trust, WS-MetadataExchange, and WS-SecurityPolicy. Identities were transmitted in digitally signed XML tokens.My role in the team was to develop the test case manager (TCM) used to setup, run, monitor, and report the results from all the automated tests used by the CardSpace team. The TCM could coordinate a test run over N machines using .NET 3.0 (Indigo) web-services.I also was responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining CardSpace V2 scenario tests for UX, public API’s, installation, ActiveX controls, and interoperability

Smart Run systems developed a data-monitoring solution for CDMA cellular networks that allowed RF Engineers in the field to log and display network diagnostics.I was involved in the architecture, and implementation of new features for Verizon Wireless’ data monitoring (DM) tool. Responsibilities included creation of new displays, as well as adding support for new devices to log data from. Supporting new devices involved creating their communication handlers in C++. All graphical user interfaces were done in Java. The layers were linked using the Java Native Interface (JNI). I also created a dynamic mapping application to compliment Verizon Wireless’ DM tool. RF data from a wide variety of sources (CDMA phones, multi-channel RF scanners) could be overlaid onto street maps using corresponding GPS positioning. Users could then configure map scale, view-window, and overlay symbols. Data was presented to the user in a way to make discoverability of specific cellular network problems easy and accurate.