Brethorsting

Aaron Brethorst

aaron [atmark goes here] brethorsting [dot goes here] com

Objective

To create elegant software capable of delighting my customers.

Core Competencies

  • Program Management
    • Release planning
    • Requirements gathering
    • End-to-end scenario design
    • Specification writing
    • Bug triage
    • Conflict resolution
    • Security incident management
  • User Experience Design
    • User interface design
    • Graphic and visual design
    • Accessibility and Section 508 compliance
    • Qualitative and quantitative usability testing
  • General
    • Public speaking and writing
    • Managing cross-functional teams
    • Deep background in psychology
    • Customer empathy and interaction

Key Skills

Proficient with many processes, languages and tools, including:

Functional Areas and Processes

  • Project management methodologies including Scrum, waterfall and iterative development
  • Usability testing techniques including: paper prototyping, cognitive walkthroughs and heuristic evaluation

Languages and Frameworks

  • Mac OS X: Carbon, Cocoa and Objective C
  • Web: ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails and PHP; Silverlight; HTML, CSS and Javascript
  • Windows: C# and the .NET Framework, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation
  • Other languages include: ANSI C, Scheme and VDM-SL

Tools

  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Apple Xcode and Interface Builder
  • Microsoft Expression Studio: Blend, Design, Encoder and Web
  • Microsoft Project
  • Microsoft Visual Studio

Work Experience

Skytap, Inc. - Seattle WA

Program Manager - November 2007 - Present
  • Building highly polished user experiences for an exciting new virtualization solution in Ruby on Rails.
  • Developing features and fixing bugs
  • Driving requirements gathering, writing specs, building schedules, managing an engineering team and acting as the go-between for engineering to ops, sales, marketing and management.

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

Program Manager - Microsoft Popfly - January 2007 - November 2007
  • Designed and implemented the current Popfly user interface, decreasing average page load times by 15%, cutting the product test matrix in half, and substantially improving cross-browser compatibility
  • Designed and drove the first implementation of social networking features in Popfly in three weeks with two developers
  • Drove advertising strategy and defined implementation plan for serving ads in Popfly
  • In addition to Program Management responsibilities, pitched in to fix over 150 product bugs. This enabled our development team to focus on creating new features and helped speed time to market
  • Managed vendor relationships to create an improved mashup design experience; brought the project in on time and within budget, satisfying all internal stakeholders
  • Managed all security requirements for Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions, ensuring that the entire Express product line was in line with standard Microsoft product security requirements
  • Enabled interaction between Popfly team and its user community by managing the creation and daily oversight of community forums, with over 90% of all community questions and issues seeing resolution within two days

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

Program Manager - Visual Studio - November 2003 - January 2007
  • Managed User Experience for the Visual Studio 2005 product line, balancing requirements for completely different user segments.from non-professional developers to architects.and ensuring an optimal experience across our product line
  • Led a thirty person cross-functional virtual team to drive Accessibility requirements and training across a 2000 person division, decreasing Section 508 compliance exceptions by 60%
  • Created the Visual Studio user interface guidelines, enabling thousands of engineers inside and outside of Microsoft to create more consistent user experiences with less work, and decreasing UI bug flow by 30%
  • Drove the creation of tooling to simplify how Visual Studio's user interface updates are created, decreasing design group's time on job by 50% and saving development and test resources weeks of time over the Visual Studio 2008 release
  • Found and fixed over 800 user experience bugs, proving instrumental in Visual Studio 2005 earning Infoworld's Best IDE Award for 2005
  • Led a cross-functional virtual team in assessing the state of all nine Microsoft developer tools suites and developing the divisional strategy on Windows Vista compatibility; convinced divisional management on a major realignment of divisional resources, enabling us to ship a compatibility release for Visual Studio 2005
  • Briefed Microsoft field employees on the state of Visual Studio support for Windows Vista, enabling them to provide accurate, up-to-date information to their clients
  • Led a cross-functional team in developing comprehensive, scenario-oriented plans to modernize and improve the Visual Studio user experience for the Visual Studio 2008 release
  • Managed a feature team of developers and testers in creating the new user interface for Visual Studio 2008, while simultaneously cutting over fifty thousand of lines of code
  • Worked extensively with partners to improve their products. user experience by regularly presenting at extensibility developer labs and working one-on-one to give targeted, actionable user interface feedback
  • Contributed the cover article for .NET Developer Journal's June 2005 issue, which introduced thousands of software developers to the Visual Studio VSIP extensibility system
  • Designed and executed the first-ever usability study for the Visual Studio SDK, leading to the discovery and correction of severe usability issues across the breadth of the SDK

Chimp Software LLC - Seattle WA

Owner/Founder - May 2003 - Present
  • Conceived of and built the highly-regarded Mac OS X alarm clock iRooster while in college, which sold to over 3000 customers in four years
  • Designed, implemented, tested and released seven major revisions of iRooster
  • Conceived and executed effective marketing campaigns at extremely low cost, driving exposure to thousands of prospects via a combination of alliance marketing, search marketing and promotional campaigns
  • Built a loyal customer base by focusing on delivering beautiful, easy-to-use software

Education

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

Emphasis in Human-Computer Interaction
University of Minnesota - Twin Cities - 2000 - 2003