Francis Zhou Email & Phone Number

Seattle, Washington, United States

Redmond, Washington

• Primary PM owner in charge of driving scenario gathering, design, and feature implementation for the Windows reliability backend service.
• Improved Azure platform reliability by establishing KPIs to measure actual customer impact, and drive issues to resolution across multiple organizations.
• Moved quality upstream by coordinating with multiple teams across Microsoft to surface reliability insights along relevant code segments in developers IDE.
• Empowered 3000+ Microsoft engineers to efficiently debug and diagnose reliability issues through F2F interaction, support emails, documentation, tutorial videos, and newsletters.
• Improved developers’ ability to root cause analyze reliability issues by evangelize and implementing the “retrodiction” concept across multiple services.
• Successfully upheld the services’ GDPR compliance by working with privacy and legal to create, approve, and audit data access policies.

Redmond, Washington

• Established DirectInk platform as the modern high-performance inking platform by designing a set of APIs fulfilling customer needs.
• Ensured continuing success of DirectInk platform by developing a multi-year roadmap and ISV adoption strategy based on marketing data.
• Evangelized platform adoption through //Build conference presentations, 1:1 customer visits, and helping developers to find the right solution for their needs.
• Protected the Interaction Platform team’s intellectual property by soliciting, drafting, reviewing and filing more than 20 patent applications across a 2-year span.
• Pushed the envelope of innovation in the digital inking and bi-manual interaction space through ideation and collaboration with design and research. Directly contributed to 8 patents in this area.

Redmond, WA

• Ensured high quality releases of Windows Phone soft keyboard and Browser OS components by establishing and upholding rigorous engineering processes.
• Shipped the best-in-market smartphone soft keyboard through close collaboration with PM, dev, and research counterparts on the design, development and quality evaluation.
• Significantly improved the quality and efficiency of ODM touch screen certification test program through automation and heeding customer feedback.
• Turned around a low morale inherited team through leadership by example, hired and grew 3 star-performers to the next career band within 2 years.

Redmond, WA

• Started as the only tester on the team, conducted over 50 interviews to staff up a team of FTEs and vendors. Developed the team into a high performing technical talent pool with great reputation across the org.
• Improved UI performance 10x from abysmal (3fps) to MVP (30fps) by driving and collaborating across multiple disciplines and dependency teams.

• As a founding member of the test org, interviewed and hired 100+ top graduates from Chinese universities to ensure the org’s talent pool matched projects’ demands.
• Working with other leaders within the team, helped to establish the organizational culture of Ownership, Responsibility and Excellence.
• Led teams of 20+ SDETs and shipped multiple high-quality Windows components, with technologies ranging from client platform, OS Shell, Mobile apps, to Text-2-Speech.
• Ensured the team’s success by setting up communication and collaboration channels with stakeholders in Redmond HQ and 3P OEM, defined goals and managed dependencies across time zones and locales.

• Significantly improved testing efficiency by architecting, implementing and evangelizing one of the first automated test frameworks within the GDI+ test team.
• Successfully led a team of testers to make the transition from STE to SDET, by training/retaining/growing/hiring talents.
• Successfully drove the WPF Component Based Build migration to completion by taking on both testing and PM role.