As senior development lead on the Windows Client Performance team, Aaron Dietrich had toiled to make sure Windows 7-based PCs would fire up like rockets. But he was surprised again and again when praise for the faster start-up performance popped up repeatedly in the press and in the blogosphere.

Dietrich, who came to Microsoft nine years ago after completing graduate studies at Rochester Institute of Technology, worked with Windows 7 features teams to keep the operating system lean enough to clock significantly faster start-up times.

What was your role working on Windows 7?

Dietrich: For Windows 7, I was on the Windows Client Performance team. Rather than owning a specific feature, we kind of work as a liaison with many different teams within Windows to help them analyze and resolve performance issues with the operating system.

How did you increase start-up performance in Windows 7?

Dietrich: There were a couple of key features that allowed us to get better boot times. The first was we introduced what we call the fast boot feature, which allows some parts of boot to happen in the background while Windows is discovering and initializing devices. That helped us gain up to 25 percent of our boot time over Windows Vista, depending on the hardware.

The other big one was that we significantly reduced the size of the operating system required to be read from disk in order to boot. Whereas Windows Vista required somewhere on the order of 220 to 240 megabytes of operating system code to boot, Windows 7 requires anywhere from 140 to 180 megabytes, depending on the configuration of the system.

What was a typical day like working on Windows 7?

Dietrich: As I said, we worked with other teams to try and help them design the right features and do analysis to make sure they were performing the way they expected them to. As the teams built their features, occasionally regressions in performance would come in. Bugs do happen. We have a lot of checks in place called "perf gates" that run on every build produced daily in Windows. That monitors everything from boot times to shutdown time and a bunch of other metrics.  If any of them ever regressed, we jumped on that, did some analysis, and tried to help teams resolve the issue.

It’s very sinusoidal. You go through these relative periods of calm where you’ve got all your ducks in a row. And then you always have those periods leading up to milestones, where everyone is crunching through things, and it gets a little bit hectic.

How important was teamwork to your job?

Dietrich: Teamwork is absolutely critical. There’s no way we could have gotten faster boot times just by my work alone. I was more of the ambassador trying to evangelize the best designs and changes to these teams. But I also needed to be able to maintain those positive relationships to make sure the agenda we were trying to drive on the performance team was moving ahead the way we wanted it to.

All that cross-group work does naturally take a bit of time, but it is rewarding to work with so many different types of people on so many different types of projects. It’s not a place where you own one feature and can dive into it and see it to completion. You get to work and you get to wear lots of different hats. That’s one of the biggest rewards of being on the performance team.

What was the most important or surprising thing you learned while working on Windows 7?

Dietrich: The amount of time it takes to work with so many different teams. It’s not just firing off an e-mail and waiting for someone to get back to you to say "Hey, I did it." It really takes continually working with these folks, going and meeting with them, building that personal relationship. I always thought that was valuable, but I never really realized just how important that aspect was until I had gone through that cycle with Windows 7. The PM [program management] team on the performance team played a key role supporting me here during the latter parts of Windows 7.

During that final stretch—when it was crunch time—those relationships became more and more important. Having those folks support a fast-boot agenda rather than having them feel like they were being dragged into it was key. I wanted to get them excited about the work they were doing rather than feel as though any time they get an e-mail from me, it was a tax.

What’s the thing you’re proudest of in Windows 7?

Dietrich: All the positive reviews we’ve gotten out of boot. While I was happy with the work we did, I never really expected it to get as much positive press as it did. I didn’t think people would get that excited about it, I guess.

What’s next for you at Microsoft?

Dietrich: After Windows 7 shipped, I moved to the Fundamentals Ecosystem team. That’s within the same fundamentals organization as the performance team, but now my team specifically supports the OEMs [original equipment manufacturers]. That’s so we can ensure we don’t just have a rock-solid OS in the shrink wrap that we build, but that the operating systems that actually get out to our customers when they buy an OEM system are of the same high quality that we have in the core OS.

What do you do when you’re not working?

Dietrich: I have an 8-year-old daughter and a lovely wife I love to spend time with. I like to do some hiking when I can. I’m also starting to learn how to ski, but not very well.

(via Microsoft News Center)

The senior program manager loves her job connecting spokes and keeping the wheel turning. For Windows 7, the wheel Deutsch helped turn was to develop a brand new feature that allows users to more quickly jump to frequently used destinations.

Called a Jump List, the feature is activated when a user right-clicks certain icons in the taskbar or hovers over icons in the Start menu. The Jump List window then pops up with links to transport the user to frequently or recently used documents, files, Web sites and more.

Deutsch, who interned twice on Microsoft’s Windows team as a Carnegie Mellon University student, joined the company as an employee after graduating. More than five years later, she still enjoys working on the "pieces that make up the cornerstones of what the Windows operating system means to users." The News Center asked her about working on Windows 7.

What feature did you work on for Windows 7, and what does it do?

Deutsch: I worked on a couple of different areas. The Jump List feature was a lot of my focus. I also worked on the Start menu in Windows 7, which was not changed too radically but had some maintenance and targeted feature improvement, like adding the Jump List.

What is a Jump List, and how does it work?

Deutsch: The real core of it is getting you to your end destination as quickly and efficiently as possible. You’re not launching Word to see the blank document. Often, what you’re really trying to do is get to your content, task, Web site, file, album, or whatever it is. The idea of the Jump List is to reduce all those extra steps that you used to have to do to get to your end goal.

What was a typical day like working on Windows 7?

Deutsch: That’s a really hard question to answer, especially for a project manager. Our job changes a lot as you go through the product cycle.

During planning, it’s back-to-back meetings talking with small groups hashing out ideas and proposals. As you move into development, the day becomes a lot more about closing the door and sitting heads-down to hammer out the feature specifications on a page so that developers and testers can have a concrete document to work on of what they need to build.

I sometimes think of my job as being the center of a wheel with a lot of different spokes, and I need to make sure the whole wheel is turning together, going in the right direction, and getting there on time.

Was teamwork important to the Jump List feature?

Deutsch: Hugely. We had a really strong feature team that spanned across all the disciplines working together. Really, from day one we were doing brainstorms and planning meetings, and all the pieces were very critical and needed to work all together through planning and development. Beyond that, there was also a great collaboration across the project managers on our team because a lot of the pieces hinged together. A Jump List isn’t something that can live on its own, being part of the taskbar and part of the Start menu.

What do you need to do your best work?

Deutsch: It’s a little bit silly, but I’ve always felt very akin to the color purple as a soothing, calming thing. There’s a lot of purple in my office, and I wear a lot of purple, and I have a reaction that’s calming and grounding when I see that color.

There’s time of day—I tend to be more of a night owl than a morning person. I’ve kind of always done better work in the later hours than the early hours, but I’m trying to find ways to accommodate both. And there’re other people—I really thrive with a strong team and other great minds to bounce ideas off and discuss and debate. That’s where we see the best ideas, is through those discussions.

What was the most important or surprising thing you learned while working on Windows 7?

Deutsch: I am proud of the Windows 7 process going from the start to the end without losing sight of the value of what we were trying to provide. It really kind of cemented a perspective and way of working that is valuable to carry forward to future versions of Windows. It’s not about just thinking of cool ideas or changing things for change’s sake. It’s really about understanding what we’re doing so that we are grounded in our goals and the problems we’re trying to solve.

How did customer feedback help you build the Jump List feature?

Deutsch: We really did a lot of deep work on understanding the usability of our feature using the customers’ reaction and needs. We definitely got lots and lots of feedback.

We had a lot of prototyping going on early on in labs, and we brought users in to try it and sent prototypes out to real customers to use for a couple of months at a time. That was really critical in helping us hone the design and refine it so we weren’t getting huge surprises at the end.

What was the biggest challenge or hurdle you faced working on your feature?

Deutsch: As with any kind of feature development, you can get some great ideas that can balloon into huge, huge amounts of work. We were trying to home in on the core values we were trying to provide with the feature and to not lose sight of that as we were adjusting plans and implementation to make it feasible.

It’s easy during that process of scoping to lose sight of what the value of the end result is, so we really just had to make sure we were able to find ways of delivering that value in a way that we could meet our deadlines and make it feasible to build. With the Jump List, we had an idea of the feature we wanted to provide, and there were so many ways we could have implemented it—and we just had to find the right path to meet our deadline and still make it feasible and high quality.

What’s the thing you’re proudest of in Windows 7?

Deutsch: I felt like we had a super strong team that worked well together. There was a lot of debate, but in a healthy way. Everyone was really very much collaborating on the same page about making something great together rather than as individuals. I’m also pretty proud that we didn’t have any major surprises in the last minutes. It really spoke to the diligence and depth of our planning and product cycle.

(via Microsoft Presspass)