Microsoft Research Podcast - What’s Your Story: Weishung Liu

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

Principal PM Manager Weishung Liu shares how a career delivering products and customer experiences aligns with her love of people and storytelling and how—despite efforts to defy the expectations that come with growing up in Silicon Valley—she landed in tech.Learn more:Weishung Liu at Microsoft ResearchWatch For | Project pageDeveloper Tech Minutes: Watch For | Video, 2021

Hey, listeners, I'm Weisheng Liu, Principal PM Manager with Microsoft Research and today's podcast guest. Before we get started, I want to tell you about Microsoft Research Forum. It's a series of discussions and talks examining how the rapid advances in AI are impacting science and technology research. The next episode is June 4th, and colleagues of mine from around Microsoft Research are participating. I highly recommend checking it out. You can learn more and register now at aka.ms forward slash my research forum. All right, here's today's show. I've always felt like I want the things that I work on to create joy in people.

The fact that I can still be here and create impact and do meaningful work and, you know, work on things that create joy and positively impact society, it speaks to me like stories speak to me. Microsoft Research works at the cutting edge. But how much do we know about the people behind the science and technology that we create? This is What's Your Story and I'm Johannes Gehrke. In my 10 years with Microsoft, across product and research, I've been continuously excited and inspired by the people I work with and I'm curious about how they became the talented and passionate people they are today. So I sat down with some of them. Now I'm sharing their stories with you. In this podcast series, you'll hear from them about how they grew up, the critical choices that shaped their lives, and their advice to others looking to carve a similar path. In this episode, I'm talking with Principal PM Manager Wei-Sheng Liu.

Wei has used her love of storytelling and interest in people and their motivations to deliver meaningful products and customer experiences. This includes the creation of a successful line of Disney plush toys and contributions to the satellite internet system Starlink. With Microsoft, she helped develop Watch4, a real-time video analytics platform that has gone on to enhance gaming via streaming highlights and to support content moderation in products such as Xbox. Today, she's facilitating connections and devising strategies to empower teams within Microsoft Research to maximize their reach. Here's my conversation with Wei, beginning with her childhood in Silicon Valley.

Hi, Wei. Welcome to What's Your Story? You're our principal PM manager here in the lab, and we'll talk in a little while about what you're doing here right now, but maybe let's start with how did you actually end up in tech? Where did you grow up? Oh, wow. Okay.

So this is a very long long and like non-linear story about how I got into tech. So I grew up in Silicon Valley which one would assume means just like oh yes you grew up in Silicon Valley therefore you must be in the STEM field and therefore you will be in tech for the rest of your life. Yep that's what that's true. It's a very linear story. And I totally actually wanted to rebel against that whole notion of going into tech. So I grew up in Silicon Valley and thought like, man, I want to not do STEM. So did your parents want to be either doctor or engineer? Absolutely, it was a doctor, engineer or lawyer. So thankfully, my sister went the PhD in psychology route. So she kind of checked that box for us. And so I was hospitalized a lot.

I was in the ER a lot. But that actually afforded me a lot of opportunities to be sort of an indoor-only child of reading and playing video games and all sorts of things that I would say expanded my worldview. It was just all sorts of different stories. Reading has stories. Video games have stories. Tell us a story about reading and a story about video games what really what is your favorite set of books um i was really interested in like historical fiction at the time one book that i remember was reading about oh my gosh it's a very famous book and i don't remember the name anymore however it was about a young girl's perspective

of being, living in an internment camp, the Japanese internment camps back during World War II, I believe, after Pearl Harbor. And it was just kind of her diary and her perspective. It was almost like Diary of Anne Frank, but from a Japanese American girl's perspective instead and I just loved kind of reading about different viewpoints and different eras and trying to understand like where where do we overlap how do things change over time how does history repeat itself in some ways and and I love that um and then video games so I was really into Japanese RPGs back in the day. So it's funny. My first console was a Mattel Intellivision 2.

And then it gradually went up to like Super Nintendo, Super Nintendo, all those consoles. But I had a friend who I used to play RPGs with. So these were networked RPGs or individual RPGs? These were individual RPGs. This is, you know, when I was around 10, the internet appeared, so it probably dates me a little bit.

But every time a new RPG came out, like by, the company is now called Square Enix, but back then it was called Squaresoft, or Nintendo, like Zelda. He and I would immediately go out and buy the game, or convince our parents at the time to buy the game, and then we would compete. So this is not couch co-op.

He was actually in Texas. Like long-distance co-op. This is long-distance gaming, where we would compete to see who would beat the game first. Wow. No, you're not allowed to use walkthroughs. And he almost always beat me. But these games are like 60-hour, 80-hour games?

Yeah, like 60, 80-hour games. But we got so good at them that you had to figure out, how do you kind of bypass and get through the main quest as fast as possible? So that was always... So the main quest and things like that. Oh, yeah, no. So I'm actually a huge completionist, though. So I'd always go back after. quest as fast as possible um so that was the main of the side quest and things like yeah oh yeah no so i'm i'm actually a huge completionist though so i'd always go back after and do all the side

quests to get you know we'll just say 100 achievement that's a little bit of an achievement machine that way but um so like that kind of stuff was always super fun for me um and so I spent so much of my time then, because I was kind of more homebound a lot, just exploring and being curious about things. And that got me into art and in design. And I thought, man, I'm going to be an architect someday because I love designing experiences, like spaces for people. You thought at that point in time, like a a real like a building architect or like an architect for like virtual worlds or so? No, like a real physical space that people inhabit and experience.

And so like I avoided as much STEM as I could in school. I couldn't just due to where I lived and grew up and the high school requirements that I had. But the minute I went to college, which happened to be at the University of Washington, which has a great architecture program, I was like, I'm never going to take another STEM class

in my life. So you enrolled as an architecture major? I enrolled as an architecture major. And I was like, I will do the, what we would call the natural world credits was which is kind of the stem like things but I would intentionally find things that were not like hard science because I'm never gonna do this again I'm never gonna be in tech all these people that are so obsessed with tech who you know went to MIT and Stanford and I'm like nah I'm gonna be an architecture major so you took like the physics for poets class or so. Stuff like that, right? Very, very similar. But I ended up just loving learning at school, which is very unsurprising.

You know, I took like an Arabic poetry class. I took a French fairy tales class. And I just kind of explored college and all the things that it had to offer in terms of academics so much that I actually ended up deciding to get two degrees. One in industrial design, which is not too far away from architecture. Architecture is like large spaces, like you build one building or design one building that lasts maybe 100 years. Industrial design, I kind of joke about it. It's, you know, you design smaller form factors. And sometimes if they're manufactured with plastics, last millions of years, you build millions of them.

But then I also ended up getting a degree in comparative religion as well, which it meant that like my schooling and my class schedules are always a little bit odd because I'd go from, you know, like the industrial design shop down in our design building and like making things with my hands and working at the bandsaw. And then I, you know, rushed to this other class where we'd have like very fascinating philosophical debates about various things in sort of the comparative religion space. And I'd write, you know, 10-page essays and about all sorts of things. And, you know, there's like the study of death is a great example and how

different cultures react to death. But, you know, that was as far away from STEM as I could have possibly gone. Right. I was just thinking, I mean, can you maybe explain to our listeners a little bit who maybe come a little bit more from the STEM field traditionally? What do you study in comparative literature? What is the field like? So for me, it was really just like, I took a lot of classes just trying to understand people.

I really, and it sounds kind of silly to say it that way, but religion is really formed and shaped by people. I really, and it sounds kind of silly to say it that way, but religion is really formed and shaped by people. And so for me, like the types of classes that I took were sort of like studying Western religion, studying Eastern religion, studying the philosophy of religion, like, or even, and this still, I still think about it from time to time, how do you define religion? And just even, there's still so many scholarly debates about how religious versus something else or just completely made up, you know, pseudoscience, whatever, right? People have this wide spectrum of things that they describe. But it's really around learning about the different foundations of religion. And then people tend to specialize, they might specialize in a particular area like Hinduism

or broadly speaking Eastern religions or people start focusing on Western religions. Or sometimes they think about a specific topic like the intersection of, for example, religion and death or religion and art, or even know religion and violence and there's a broad spectrum of things that people start specializing in and and it's very it's sort of it's very much in the mind but very much in the heart of how you understand that. I can see how it even connects to industrial design because maybe you also want to capture

the heart. Yes yep and that's that's kind of how I how I to industrial design because you also want to capture the heart. Yes. Parts of people. Yep. And that's kind of how I describe, you know, people are like, why did you major in that? Like, what do you even do with that? Did you even think about what career you would have with that? I'm like, no, I just really wanted to learn. And I really wanted to understand sort of like sociologically how people think and get into that deep um like that deep feeling of faith and how where does it come from and how does it

manifest and how does it motivate people to do things in life um and to your point it's very similar to industrial design because you're you know we talk about design thinking and you have to really deeply understand the user and the people that you're designing for in order to create something that really lasts, that matters to them. So that's kind of at least my undergrad experience. And in a very, very brief way, I'll just kind of walk through or at least tell you the very non-linear path that I took to get to where I am here now at Microsoft Research. So like the day after I graduated from the University of Washington, I moved to Florida. And just as a question, so you graduated from the University of Washington, did you have like a plan? You know, this is like the kind of career I want to have.

So here's the funny thing about design. and I hope, you know, my other, the designers who might be watching or listening to this might not get upset, hopefully don't get upset with me about this, is I loved the design thinking aspect of design, like understanding why people do the things they do. What types of habits can you build with the products, physical products? I was very obsessed with physical, tangible things at the time. And then I learned through like internships and talking to other designers who were, you know, already in the field that that's not what they do. That they don't go and like, oh, let's go talk to people and understand

deeply what they do. Like there's other people that do that. Okay, what do you do? Well, I work in, you know, CAD or I work on SolidWorks or I do Rhino and I do surfacing. I'm like, okay, what else? Who decides what gets made? Oh, that's like, you know, a product manager or product plan. Like, oh, who, what's that? Who, what does that even mean? Like, tell me more about that.

So it's like the dichotomy that you see even here in the company where the engineers have to sort of build the things, but the product managers are the program managers in the middle. Someone else is kind of, you know, interpreting what the market and the users are saying, what the business is saying. And I was like, I like doing that because that's more about understanding people in the business and the reason, the why. And so. Just before we go to your career, I mean, I have to ask. What are some of the favorite things that you built during your undergrad? and the business and the reason, the why. And so. Just before we go to your career, I mean, I must not, I have to ask. Yeah, go ahead.

What are some of the favorite things that you built during your undergrad? Because you said you really liked to build physical things. Oh my gosh. What are like two, one or two things that you actually built? Yeah. That was so fun. So, so one of my projects

was actually a Microsoft sponsored project for one quarter. And they, all of they showed up with with his name, Steve Caneco. He retired not too long ago from here. Steve showed up and said, I want you all to design a memory sharing device. And that was it. So what is memory sharing? He didn't define that further? He didn't define it because as designers,

that was our way of interpreting. We had to interpret and understand what that meant for ourselves. And it was a very, very freeform exploration. And I thought the place that I started from was, at the time, I was like, there's like six or seven billion people in the world. How many of them do I actually know? And then how many of them do I actually want to know? Or maybe I want to know better to share memory to share my memories with to share a part of me like memories are who we are um or not who

we are but parts of who we are and I and drive who we become in some ways uh and so I thought you know what'd be cool is if you had a bracelet, and the bracelet were individual links, and each individual link was a photo, like a digital photo, very tiny digital photo, that you chose to share. And so, you know, I designed something at the time, like the story that I told was like, well, you know, this woman who's young decided to go to, you know, she's taking the bus and she put on her, like, I wish to go to Paris kind of theme, right? So she had a bunch of Parisian looking things and, or something in that vein, right? And, you know, she gets on the bus and her, her bracelet vibrates. There's a, like a haptic reaction from this bracelet. And that means that there's

someone else on the bus with this, you know, with a bracelet, with their memories. It's kind of an indicator that people want to share their stories with someone else. And, you know, wouldn't it be great if, you know, this woman now sits down on the bus because she sits next to the person who's wearing it. Turns out to be an elderly woman who's wearing, coincidentally, you know, her Paris bracelet, but it's of her honeymoon of her deceased husband from many years ago. And, you know, like think of the power of the stories that they could share with each other that, you know, this woman, elderly woman can share with, you know, this younger woman who has aspirations to go and the memories and the relationship that they can build from that. And so that was kind of my memory sharing device at the time. I mean, it's super

interesting because, I mean, the way I think about this is that we have memory sharing applications now like Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and so on, but the algorithm decides really who to share it with and where and why to share it. Whereas here it's proximity, right? It somehow leads to this physical and personal connection afterwards, right? The connection is not like, okay, suddenly on my bracelet, her stories show up. But you know, maybe we sit next to each other on the bus and it vibrates and then we start a conversation. Exactly. It's you own, you know, whatever content is on that you choose to have on your physical person, but you're sharing yourself in a different way and you're sharing your

memories and you're sharing a moment and it might just be a moment in time, right? It doesn't have to be a long-lasting thing, but you know this elderly woman can say, hey there's this really great bistro that we tried on, you know, this particular street and I hope it's still there because if you go ask for this person or try this thing out and like what an incredible opportunity is for this other woman who you know maybe she does someday go to Paris and she does find it and she thinks of that time like how grateful she was to have met you know this woman on the bus and just for that brief whatever bus however long that bus ride was to have that connection to learn something new about someone

else, to share and receive a part of somebody else who you may never have known otherwise. And then that was what I was thinking of, you know, in terms of a memory sharing device was memory creates connections or it reinforces connections. So I guess very similar to my people thing and being fascinated by people, like this was my way of trying to connect people in a different way in the space that they inhabit and not necessarily on their devices. And then what did Microsoft say to that? Was there like an end of quarter presentation? Oh, yeah, there was a big old presentation.

I can't remember which building we were at, but I think everybody was just like, wow, this is great. And that was it. It sounds like a really fascinating device. Yeah, it was. And lots of people came up with all sorts of really cool things because everybody interpreted the, I'll just say, the prompt differently, right? And that was my interpretation of the prompt at the time. Well, super interesting. Yeah. Coming back to, so, okay, so you're at Jan just a bunch of really amazing projects.

It seems like you literally lived the notion of liberal education. I did. I, like, even now, I just love learning. I get my hands on all sorts of weird things. I picked up whittling as a random example. What is whittling? So, whittling is basically carving shapes into wood. So, I'm also very accident prone. So, there's, like, lots of gloves I had to wear to protect my hands.

But, you know, I was like, oh, I really just want to pick up whittling. And I literally did. You know, you just can grab a stick and you can actually buy bolts of wood that's in a decent shape. You can just start carving away at whatever. Whatever you would like to form that piece of wood into, it can become that.

So I made a cat. And then I made what I jokingly refer to as my fidget toy at home. It's just a very smooth object. I just made it very round and smooth, and you can just kind of like rub it. And yeah. Super interesting. I pick up a lot of random things because it's just fascinating to me.

I learned a bunch of languages when I was in school. I learned Coptic when I was in school for no other reason than, hey, that sounds cool. You can read the Dead Sea Scrolls and learn Coptic. Okay. Wow. And so much, so important in today's world, right, which is moving so fast, there's love for learning and especially directed in some areas. Yeah. You know, that's just really an awesome skill.

Yeah. And so you just graduated. You said you moved to Florida. Yes, yes. So about a month before this happened, right, it didn't just spontaneously happen. an awesome skill yeah and so you just graduated you said you moved to florida yes yes so so about a month before i had this happen right it didn't just spontaneously happen a month before i had a good friend from the architecture program who um had said hey way you know i'm applying for this role in guest services at disney i was like really you can do that and she's like yeah so i was like

that sounds really cool. And I, you know, went to like the Disney career side. I'm like one month or two months away from graduating. Still like not sure what I'm totally going to do because at that point I'm like, I don't think I want to be a designer. Because I don't, the part that I love about it, the part that I have passion about is not in the actual design of the object. But it's about the understanding of why it needs to exist. And there's an action between the people and the design. The people and the design, exactly.

And so when I found, I found this like product development internship opportunity. I was like, what does that even mean? That sounds cool. At Disney. At Disney. And it was like, and Disney's tag tagline the theme park merchandise's tagline was um creating tangible memories i was like oh boy this this just checks all the boxes um so i applied i interviewed did a phone interview and they hired me within 24 hours

they're like we would like you to come and i was like i would absolutely love to move to florida and work there um so yeah the day after i graduated um from udub i drove all the way across the country from seattle with two cats that must be an interesting adventure by itself oh yes uh with two cats in the car which me tell you it's fascinating all the way to Orlando Florida um and uh the day that I got there or no two days after I got there I found out that I was going to be working in the toys area so plush and dolls which is like you can imagine just absolutely amazing um making uh like stuffed toys that then because my office was a mile down the road from disney's animal kingdom and therefore a couple miles away from magic kingdom or hollywood studios or epcot i could actually go see i'll just say the fruits of my labor instantly and not only that see it bring joy to children.

So what is the path? So you would design something and how quickly would it then actually end up in the park? Or how did you, I mean, how did you just follow that job? What's the interface between the people and the design? Yeah, so really, I didn't actually do any design. There was an entire group called Disney Design Group that does all the designing there. And so what I did was I understood what do we need to make and why? memories are what tangible memories do we want to create for people why does it matter to them in many ways it's sort of like it's still a business right you're creating tangible memories to earn to generate revenue and increase the bottom line for the company but so my role was to

understand what trends were happening, what were the opportunities, what were guests doing in the parks, what types of things are guests looking for, what are we missing in our in our SKU lineup or stock keeping unit lineup. And then in which merchandising areas do they need to happen? happen. And so I actually, as part of my internship, my manager said, hey, I let every intern, every time they're here, come up with any idea they want. And you just have to see it from start to execution in addition to all the other stuff that I worked on. I was like, sounds good. And I came up with this idea that I was like, you know, it'd be cool. Ugly dolls was really popular at the time. Designer toys were getting really popular from Kid Robot which was kind of like there was this vinyl thing and you can it was just decorative of all different art styles on the same canvas I was like you know

what if we did that with Mickey and then you know what if the story that we're telling is you know just for the parks, Walt Disney World and Disneyland, that there were aliens or monsters coming to visit the park, but they wanted to blend in and fit in. Well how would they do that? Well, they clearly see Mickey heads everywhere, and Mickey's very popular here, clearly. And so they try to dress up like Mickey, but they don't do it quite well so they got the shape right but everything else about them is a little bit different and they all have their

own unique personalities and tell a story you can tell see it's all about stories and um and then it i got buy-in from everybody there like all the way way up to the VP. I had to get brand because I was messing with the brand icon. But, you know, it became an entire line called Mickey Monsters at Disney. I still have them all. There were two. It went from plush. It became consumables, which are like edible things. It went into keychains.

It was super. It was. I probably went a little bit too hard. I think I took the assignment very seriously. Yeah, it did really well in the time that it was there. We did a test and I was really, really proud of it. But, you know, my, what I did though, is, you know, very concretely was I started with an idea. I convinced and aligned with lots of people in various disciplines that this is something that we should try and experiment on. Worked with the designers to really design what this could look like. Scoped out what types of fabrics, because there's all sorts of different textures out there. Working with kind of our sourcing team to understand like which vendors do we want to work with. And then typically in the plush industry, manufacturing back in the day

could happen. And in terms of supply chain, manufacturing and then delivery of product could take about six months. And so when I was there, anything I worked on would kind of appear in six months, which was actually very cool. I mean, it's not like software or anything you work on is you're like, poop, compile. Oh, look at it. Depends on how fast your computer is. You know, it's pretty instantaneous compared to six months to see the fruits of your labor. But it was a really just such a great experience. And then seeing, you know, then going to the parks and seeing children with the thing that I worked on, the thing that I had the idea on, and like them going like, Mom, I really want this. You know, we're not really selling to the kids.

We're kind of selling to the parents. It's a little bit like this feeling that we can have here at microsoft right if any of our ideas makes it into products that are then used by a hundred million people and hopefully bring them joy and connection exactly and and that's why like i just think microsoft is great because our portfolio is so broad and and so much of our work touches different parts of our lives and i'll even pick on you know like i have i you know in my family my daughter goes to school clearly obviously she would go to school uh but she uh she is flipgrid now known as flip for a while and i was like hey that's cool like she uses something that you know i don't directly work on but my company works on well and you were in watered through Watch4, right?

Yes, I was. Which did all the moderation for Flip. Yeah, Watch4 helps to detect inappropriate content on Flip. And that's super cool because I'm like, oh, the work that I'm doing actually is directly impacting and helping people like my daughter and making a difference, keeping users safe from content that maybe we don't want them to see. helping people like my daughter and making a difference,

keeping users safe from content that maybe we don't want them to see. Other areas like Microsoft Word, I'm like, wow, this is a thing. I'm at the company that makes the thing that I've used forever. And it's just fascinating to see the types of things that we can touch here at Microsoft Research, for example, and how, you know, Marie Kondo popularized the term joy, like sparking joy. If you look at an item and if it doesn't sparkle joy, then you know, like, I've always felt like I want the things that I work on to create joy in people. And it was very obvious when you make toys that you see the joy on children's faces with it.

It's a little bit different, but it's so much more nuanced and rewarding when you also see sort of the products, the types of things that we work on in research create joy it's you know it's funny because i mentioned software is is uh instantaneous in many ways and then um you know toys takes a little bit longer but then you know in the types of research that we do sometimes it takes a little bit longer a little bit longer than six months, years to pay off. But like that return on that investment is so worth it. And, you know, I see that in kind of the work that lots hang out in now and do such crazy, cool, impactful things that help benefit the world. And, you know, it's funny, like never say never that I'm in tech and I love it. And I don't have a STEM background. I didn't get a STEM background. I didn't get it. Well, I don't have a STEM degree. Like I did not go, like I can't code my way out of a paper bag, but the fact that I can still be here and create impact and do meaningful work and,

you know, work on things that create joy and positively impact society is like, it speaks to me like stories speak to me. I mean, there's so many elements that come together in what you're saying. I mean, research is not the game of the person sitting in the lonely corner on her whiteboard, right? But it's a team sport. It requires many different people with many different skills. It requires the spark of ingenuity. It requires the deep scientific insight. It requires then the scaling and engineering.

It requires the PM to make actually the connection to the value and the execution and requires the designer to actually create that joy with the user interface. Exactly. To see how it actually fits. It's fascinating that we sometimes talk about research being like a lonely journey.

It can be, but it can also be such an empowering, collaborative journey that you can build such incredible, cool things when you bring people together, cross-disciplinary people together to dream bigger and dream about new ideas and new ways of thinking. That's why I also love talking to researchers here because they all have such unique perspectives and inner worlds and lives that are frankly so different from my own and i think when they encounter me they're like she's very different

from us too um but i think these differences are super fun exactly and that's what brings us together so so how i mean if you think about Microsoft Research is over here, right here in Disney, in Florida. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And you had quite a few stops along the way. I did have a lot of stops along the way. And very non-linear also. It was also very non-linear. So Disney took me to the third, at the time, the third largest toy company in the U called Jack's Pacific where I worked on again

sort of Disney license and Mattel license products so so dress up and role play toys is what we refer to them as so dress up meaning like if you go to your local Target or Walmart or whatever kind of large large store they will have in their toy sections like dresses for Disney princesses for example or Disney fairies like I worked on stuff like that, which is also very cool, because usually around Halloween time here in the US is when I'm like, hey, I know that. And then that kind of took me

to a video game accessory organization here in Woodinville. Oh, that's the connection to tech starting to appear. There's a little bit connection of tech where I was like, I love video games. I got to work on audio products there as well like headphones. And it was the first time I started working on things that I'll just say had electrons running through them. So I had already worked on things that were like both soft lines,

we refer to a soft line as bags and things that require like fabrics and textiles. And then I worked on hard lines, which are things that are more, things that are more physically rigid, like plastics. And so I was like, okay, well, I've worked on hard lines like stuff. And now I'm going to work on hard lines with electrons running through them. That's kind of neat. And I learned all sorts of things about electricity. I was like, oh, this is weird and fascinating and circuits and whatever. And, and then I was like, oh, this is weird and fascinating and circuits and whatever. And then I was like, well, this is cool, but what else is there? And it took me to not a very well-known company in some circles, but a company called Fluke Corporation. Fluke is best known for its digital multimeters. And I worked there on their thermal imaging cameras.

So for people who don't know, it's kind of like Predator vision. You can see what's hot. You can see what's not. It's very cool. And Fluke spoke to me because not only is their tagline, they keep your world up and running a lot of the things that fluke does especially when i heard stories from like electricians and technicians who use fluke products are like this fluke saved my life i'm like it did what and they're like you know i was in a high voltage situation and i just wasn't paying attention i you know didn't ground properly and then there was a there was an incident but you, my multimeter survived, and more importantly,

I survived. And you're like, wow, like, that's really cool. And so while I was at Fluke, they asked me if I wanted to work on a new IoT project. And I was like, I don't even know what IoT is. Internet of things. Like, okay, well, you said things to me, and I like things. I like tangible things. Tell me more. And so that said things to me, and I like things. I like tangible things. Tell me more. And so that was kind of my first foray into things that had the of products with electrons on them, with user interfaces, and then also with software, like pure software that were running on devices like your smartphones or your tablets or your computers. And so I started learning more about like, oh, what does software development look like? Oh,

it's a lot faster than hardware development. It's kind of neat. And then that took me to SpaceX of all places. It was super weird. Like SpaceX was like, hey, do you want to come work in software here? I was like, but I'm not a rocket scientist. They're like, you don't need to be. I was like hey do you want to come work in software here I was like but I'm not a rocket scientist they're like you don't need to be I was like huh okay and so I worked on Starlink before Starlink before Starlink was was a real thing I worked on kind of the the back-office systems for for the ISP also worked on what we would refer to as our enterprise resource planning system that powers all of SpaceX. It's called Warp Drive. That's where you got all your software experience.

That's where I learned all about software and working on complex systems, also monoliths and older systems. And how do you think about, you know, sometimes zero fault tolerance systems and also, that also remain flexible for its users so they can move fast. And then from SpaceX, that took me to a startup called Likewise. It's here in Bellevue. And then from the startup, I was like, I really like those people in Microsoft. I really want to work in research because they come up

with all these cool ideas and then they can do stuff with it. And I'm such an idea person and maybe I'm pretty good at execution, but I love the idea side of things. And I discovered that over the course of my career and that's actually what brought me here to begin with. And that's sort of your superpower that you bring now here. So if I think about a typical day, what do you do throughout your day?

What is it to be a PM manager here at MSR? So it's funny because when I was just a PM and not a manager, I was more kind of figuring out how do I make this product go? How do I make this product ship? How do I move things forward and empower organizations with the products that I, people and organizations on the planet that I, to achieve more on what I'm working on? And now as a PM manager, I'm more empowering the people on my team to do that and thinking about uniquely like who are they, what are their motivations, and then how do I help them

grow? And then how do I help their grow? And then how do I help their products ship? And how do I help their teams cohere? And so really my day-to-day is so much less like being involved in the nitty-gritty details of any project at any point in time. with different people around Microsoft research and just understanding like what's going on and making sure that we're executing on the impactful work that we want to move forward. You know, it's boring to say it doesn't sound very interesting. I'm like mostly it's emails and meetings and talking and you know talking to people one-on-one, occasionally writing documents and creating artifacts that matter. But more importantly, I would say it's creating connections, helping uplift people and making sure that they are moving and being empowered in the way that they feel to help them achieve more.

That's super interesting. Maybe in closing, do you have one piece of career advice for everybody, you know, anybody who's listening? Because you had such an interesting non-linear career. Yeah, when you were at Disney, you couldn't, probably didn't imagine that you would end up here at MSR and you don't know what you got. We had a little pre-discussion. You said you don't know where you're going to go next. So what is it, what's your career advice for any listener? I would say, you know, if you're not sure, it's okay to not be sure. And, you know, instead of asking yourself why, ask yourself why not. If you look at something, you're like, hey, that job looks really cool, but I am so unqualified to do it. For whatever reason you want to tell

yourself, ask yourself why not. Even if it's, you know, you're going from toys to something in STEM or, you know, I'm not a rocket scientist, but somehow I can create value at SpaceX. Like if you want to do it, ask yourself why not and try and see what happens. Because if you stop yourself at the start before you even start trying, then you're never going to find out what happens next. Which is such an amazing note to end on. So thank you very much for the great conversation, Wei.

Yeah, thanks, Johannes. To learn more about Wei or to see photos of her work and of her childhood in Silicon Valley, visit aka.ms slash researcher stories.