I recently spoke with Eric Richardson, a Program Manager on the Xbox Studios Services team, about how he transferred skills from the Marine Corps to a job analyzing game data and driving long term strategies for Xbox Game Studios.
Can you tell me more about that? I was co-located with ground troops or doing exercises where we were doing coordinated fires, which means I was in a truck outside helping aircraft get to a certain location. Right before I was exiting the military mid, I discovered that Microsoft offered a program called Microsoft Software and Systems Academy.
My mom worked in the technology field before it really existed, so I grew up around technology and decided during my transition out of the service to apply for the Server and Cloud Administration learning path. At the time, the team was working on privacy projects and that helped give me a clear area of focus.
I could immediately jump in and help track down data, learn about privacy, and understand what we needed to do to be compliant. That perspective helped me when I transferred to a role in Xbox. I use my previous experience to give teams guidance on what KPIs to measure to improve their business. I take that broad telemetry experience and apply it to something more specific to help people solve problems, which is very exciting.
I started out on the team when it was just me, my manager, and a data scientist. We recently added two data engineers to the team, which has allowed us to focus more on our specific areas. My job is to have conversations with the Xbox Game Studios teams, learn what their needs are, and work with the engineers to develop solutions to help them better understand their users. Privacy is still an important topic, so part of my focus is to educate studios about what it means to be compliant and deliver a compliant game, and make sure they really understand what data they need in game and how the data needs to be handled.
