After all isn't that what PMs are supposed to do ?! I think it was Brian Valentine (VP running Windows, before he made a graceful exit to Amazon last year) who joked at one of the legendary Friday unwinders that he saw a PM trying to sell mattresses at the corner of the street. Well, to be honest being a PM has been very interesting experience - I have learnt a lot about process (at times a lack thereof or an excess of it), how to work with a ton of teams at the same time (some of them remote ones) and more importantly what makes me tick (bad/good managers, the need to innovate, targeting real customers with products/services they can use etc)
I will be following BrianVs example and joining Amazon from Monday as a Technical Product and Program Manager. I am pretty excited about it! Ive been wrapping things up at work, cleaning up and going through the surprisingly few processes before my last day at Microsoft. My team has been great to work with and I am sad to leave them. But a new job and beckons. To make things more interesting, I will be working in downtown, in the tallest building in Seattle, Columbia Towers.
Columbia Tower is the tall black building (office is on the 20 the floor)
Commuting from Redmond where I currently live is going to be a pain so Ive spent the past couple of weekends looking a scores of places in Belltown, Fremont, First Hill, Queen Anne and South Lake Union (SLU) neighborhoods. Each neighborhood has a distinct flavor, but SLU struck me as a very exciting one - its an up and coming neighborhood to the south of Seattle's Lake Union. My friend Saad and I spent quit some time checking out the neighborhood and Vulcan's ultra-cool discovery center
Paul Allen's firm Vulcan owns 50+ acres in the area between the lake and downtown and is developing the area by constructing condos, rental buildings, retail space a street car going to downtown as well as improving the park next to the lake. So... I was hooked to the area but wasnt able to find anything within my budget. Luckily my tennis buddy Phil hooked me up with a friend and I ended up finding a great new condo a block away from the 5 start Pan-Pacific hotel which houses a new Whole Foods in the 1st floor. The street car is also a block away. Here are some pictures of the condo (model)
Nice kitchen a stone/chalk tops, maple cabinetry
A view of the living room attached to the kitchen - I love the 13 foot window wall
A view of the complex at night - the taller building in the foreground houses the whole foods and is adjacent to the Pan Pacific Hotel
A snapshot of the floor plan
In the next few days Im going to use my creative juices on how to arrange my furniture in the new apartment and how to lay things out. I also promise to post on my first day and week at my new job - I know more than a few people are curious to find out what things are like at Amazon (you know who you are!)
