Today’s Microsoft Woman Worth Watching: Erin Chapple
Title: Group Program Manager, Management and Services, Windows Server
What’s Your Typical Day Like?
There’s no such thing as a “typical” day for Chapple. Depending on where the products on which she is working are in the cycle — planning, execution, ready to ship, etc. — she performs different functions and tasks. When it’s early on, she spends more time talking to customer; during shipping, she evaluates issues that arise and does a lot of triaging. Throughout, there are lots of meetings, meetings, meetings, she says.
Did you always want to be involved in technology? If not, what steered you this way?
In high school, Chapple enjoyed math and science and knew she wanted to go in that direction. She took a number of electronics, drafting and shop classes “because I liked problem-solving and building things,” she recalls. She decided she’d major in electrical engineering, as she had a lot of cousins in EE who showed her it could be fun, she says. She ended up getting her Bachelor’s in EE with an Environmental Engineering minor from the University of Waterloo, Canada — but still had an interest in and fondness for computer science.
A few months into her first EE job while in school, Chapple realized “it wasn’t what I thought it would be.” She says she was “too much of a people person” to spend her entire day focused on switches and routers. She had interned — not just once, but four times — at Microsoft while still in college. She had done stints on Outlook (”before it was even called Outlook,” she says) and Small Business Server. (She was awarded a patent for work she did during her first internship.)
In 1998, she was hired by Microsoft to work on the Small Business Server team and spent four years there working on the first four releases, first as an individual contributor, and later as a manager of a small team. She moved ot the Windows Server team to work on Group Policy and software updating. She then became a Group Program Manager, where she worked on the user experience and integration.