Linda Dishman

“Linda is a very detailed orientated Program Manager. I worked with her for over a year and was still amazed at some of her PM abilities. She is able to look at raw data and analyze it to extract what is needed to help her team create new process. She is also able to assess the data for what is missing and design complicated systems to gather and normalize what is missing. I took over a project from her and she created and executed an excellent transition process so that I was brought up to speed really quickly and more importantly her feature team was not overly impacted by the transition. I quickly learned that she had spent a lot of time steaming lining processes with the feature team such that a historically difficult project to manage was now running smoothly and with great communication with the feature team. Linda is one of the rare PM who truly "gets" agile and what is it to work in an agile service environment. She has a great instinct on when to escalate a date change or a last minute feature request and when to run with the changes and still get a great product out. Any time she did have to escalate an issue she provided a lot of detail so that both sides clearly understood the impact and the reasoning. I would not hesitate to recommend Linda for any position in any team!”

“Linda joined the Windows Live localization team in 2011, coming from a program management background. She had to learn the localization business from scratch as she was delivering on two major product suites; Safety Platform (SP) and Messenger Connect (MC). She demonstrated her PM skills in a calm and collected manner, especially when collaborating with others. In late 2012, she took on the task of managing the channels of international customer data, working with our feature teams to make sure the correct data points, such as language and market were being captured across our customer datasets and devising a framework to deliver monthly reports on this information. This evolved to cover international demographics and compete data over time and has become the de facto best resource of international data across Microsoft. She recently shared her work with Trustworthy Computing (TWC) to help them build up a similar resource and regularly meets with other divisions to share best practices for international business intelligence, including presenting at the March 2014 Engineering Excellence International Day. Linda is passionate about pursuing business intelligence and is completing a UW course in it to further develop the knowledge she gained over the past two years. I wish her well in continuing to pursue this career change in the future as I believe that BI makes the most of her talents.”