Michael Schechter Email & Phone Number

Kirkland, Wa, Us

Redmond, Washington, Us

I lead a 100+ person, globally distributed team of both Engineers and PMs tasked with growing Bing's audience of daily active users. My team consistently delivers strong results by integrating deeply with other Microsoft products, developing features with effective growth loops, and building external partnerships to further our business goals. With a focus on both user experiences and data driven experimentation, our work not only impacts Microsoft’s bottom line, but also empowers Bing users by allowing them to more effectively use our products.Our investments include work in the following area:- Development of Bing Chat (Search integration with GPT-4) product, including growth initiatives, entry points and integrations into key Microsoft products- Integration with Windows, including the Windows Search Box, Search Highlights and "News and Interests" feed- Integration with Edge, including InPrivate Search, sidebar search, and address bar suggestions- Loyalty programs, including Microsoft Rewards and Give with Bing- Bing Rebates- Communication channels, including emails, notifications and upsells- Applications including Bing for Xbox, Bing Wallpaper, and extensions to enhance browser experiences- Data and analytics, delivering reporting infrastructure and insights to the broad Bing product team

Redmond, Washington, Us

I managed the Bing Experiences PM team, which was responsible for all user facing aspects of Bing and Bing powered services at Microsoft, as well as the Bing Local and Maps product lines. My role required me to find the right balance between quality and revenue optimization metrics, such that the overall Bing experience continued to improve as our business expanded.• Grew the team from 70 to 90 PMs, while scaling the team culture and attracting top, diverse, internal and external talent. Expertise in online experimentation, customer empathy, and effective partnerships were all trademarks of the team.• Drove significant quality gains across key search components: UX, answers, entities/knowledge graph, query formulation and rich captions. Established the technologies, tools, and processes required to scale whole page optimization across several thousand globally distributed developers.• Accountable for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue gains via publisher side monetization. Established processes and techniques to successfully achieve these goals while improving the user experience.• Led efforts across the product to improve search quality in key international markets. I was responsible for developing international quality strategy and coordinating efforts across multiple divisions. Bing quality in target markets improved by over 60% due to these efforts, as did customer and advertiser success.• Responsible for successful replacement of Local and Maps base data providers. Drove platform and quality improvements that improved capabilities while maintaining quality as part of migration.

Redmond, Washington, Us

I managed a 40-person PM team responsible for developing relevant, cohesive, and compelling search experiences on Bing, and a growing variety of Microsoft products. Focused on the overall user experience, my team and I am responsible for building the technology that ensures the needs of our users, advertisers, partners and business are best satisfied on every search results page.• Built and managed a high performing, diverse team of Program Managers and implemented management excellence practices utilized by Microsoft teams around the world• Effectively worked across the company to develop the strategy for Bing integration in Office, Windows 10 (Cortana) and Microsoft Edge (Cortana integration). Led cross-team execution on each of these projects to successful delivery. Delivered significant market share gains against Google via these initiatives• Led development of metrics, ads operating contract, and implementation of new ad products towards the goal of Bing profitability. Delivered significant, consistent revenue gains while ensuring core product quality remained high• Developed data driven methodologies for UX experimentation across desktop and mobile experiences, allowing for rapid gains in user metrics• Delivered sustained, significant gains in whole page relevance across all competitive and online metrics• Created new development teams invested in areas of strategic importance, including entity linking, app linking and enterprise integrationThe team is located in Bellevue, WA and Sunnyvale, CA.

Redmond, Washington, Us

Led a 12-person team as part of the Bing User Experience division, responsible for the design and implementation of a shared services platform for search frontend development. Designed and developed large scale, high performance web serving tier used to serve all web requests for all search verticals, mobile, and API endpoints. Developed shared services used to unify and protect search ecosystem. Examples of services provided include rendering, security, instrumentation, experimentation, geo-location, monitoring and alerting. Created standardized API to access shared services, and worked closely with over 40 diverse partners to adapt these services. Individually responsible for coordinating and executing seamless transition from Live Search brand to Bing brand. Migrated legacy C++ rendering platform to ASP.NET MVC, resulting in over 20% efficiency gains for each front-end developer. Developed performance measurement tools and processes, as well as significant infrastructure improvements that have greatly improved end user performance and time to engagement.Responsible for developing the vision for Search Personalization, and then executing against the established roadmap. Designed and drove requirements for the development of the User Data Platform, which provides large scale, high performance search personalization signals for all Bing users. Designed heuristics for user behavior analysis and drove requirements across feature teams spanning both search and advertising products. Designed personalization features, including search history, personalized result ranking, and user centric ad optimization. Responsible for data mining of query and click logs to develop new, differentiating customer facing features. Ensure that all personalization features provide industry leading privacy controls.

Redmond, Washington, Us

Member of small development team tasked with turning a successful incubation product, "Start.com", into a scalable, personalized portal and web gadget platform for new Windows Live initiative, known as "Live.com."Responsible for feature specs, project management, technical design, partner management, and release management for all aspects of the product. Redesigned Web Service tier to improve developer experience, end user performance and security by moving from an SOAP/XML based architecture to one based on REST and JSON. Designed APIs and necessary product features for customization of core web site by large partners. This platform supported the launch of 4 major co-brands (Verizon, Qwest, Alienware and Lenovo) without engagement from the core engineering team. Drove customer requirements and services implementation for creation of mobile portal experience. Designed instrumentation platform for site and gadgets to allow for accurate reporting of customer and business intelligence data. Drove redesign of SQL Server backend infrastructure to improve performance, extensibility, and availability.

Redmond, Washington, Us

Member of SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 development teams.Conceptualized and served as primary developer on first version of SQL Server Upgrade Advisor, which shipped with SQL Server 2005. Designed and developed core analysis engine and associated API used by partners to extend product functionality. Designed and developed both graphical and command line UI components of the product, supportability features, and integrated analysis into SQL Server Setup process. Utilized C# and Managed C++ for all aspects of the product, and extensive XML for reporting componentsDeveloper on SQL Server Management Tools team. Developed database scripting components as part of SQL Server Management Studio. Developed SQL Server Database Upgrade Test Toolkit to help ISV partners identify and correct upgrade issues within proprietary applications. Worked directly with over 100 ISV partners to upgrade over 1000 customer databases prior to SQL Server 2005 RTM, and fixed associated database engine upgrade issues. Tools developed with C# and extensive T-SQL scripts.

Redmond, Washington, Us

Member of the SQL Server 2005 development team.Test automation developer on the SQL Server Playback test team. Leader on development efforts to increase automation efficiency and reduce user errors. Optimized multiple test processes, automated many manual tasks, implemented utility libraries for increased code reuse, and implemented automated test launching system. Reduced required time for full test pass by 84% and improved valid bug finding rate by 60%.Designed new test systems to identify performance and correctness bugs in core SQL engine. Met with customers and partners to solicit test participation and provide feedback about issues identified during testing of their applications. Developed shipping components for SQL Server 2000 Best Practices Analyzer.Most development performed using C++ with ASP.NET user interfaces.

Redmond, Washington, Us

Member of the SQL Server 2000 development team.Designed and implemented a high-performance database auditing tool for statistical analysis of feature usage in customer systems. Results used to prioritize test runs and drive test development for future releases. Tool was implemented using T-SQL and C++.

Washington, District Of Columbia, Us

Developed and launched a new version of the Juvenile Justice Evaluation Center website. Migrated existing static content to dynamically generated pages using extensive Perl scripting.