Scott Berkun
Author and Consultant, UIWEB
Former Lead Program Manager, Microsoft

The Myths of Innovation: The Truth about How Progress Happens

Scott worked at Microsoft from 1994-2003 on Internet Explorer (v1 thru v5), Windows, and MSN. He held various positions including lead program manager, where he led teams of developers and testers in the design, engineering, and release of major software products. As program manager, his responsibilities included: leading cross discipline feature teams, writing specs, creating prototypes, leading programmers and testers, working with 3rd party companies, triaging bugs, and anything else that needed to be done to make sure the product met its user experience, business, engineering and schedule goals. Scott also worked for 2 years in Microsoft’s Engineering Excellence Group, consulting and lecturing on software engineering and project management topics.

Scott now works full time writing, teaching and consulting. His first book, The Art of Project Management, will be published by O’reilly in the Spring of 2005. Scott has written for MS Press, Que publishing, Wired magazine, and for a time, he wrote a design/usability column for MSDN: the Microsoft developer network. Scott contributes to design and UI conferences as often as he can: he participated in panels and workshops at CHI 96, wrote a solo paper at Interact 1999, presented a tutorial at CHI 2001, organized a workshop at CHI 2002, and created and organized panel the Interactionary UI Design competition at CHI 2000 and CHI 2001.

Scott has a B.S. in Logic & Computation from Carnegie Mellon University (1994), where he studied computer science, HCI, philosophy and design.