Sarah Cooley

Curious human and tech enthusiast

Resume

Technical product manager with 14 years of experience building platforms and products, 4 years as an M1 manager.

To reliably ship value to customers in Microsoft’s highly matrixed environment, I have demonstrated ability to:

  • Lead a high-performance team that has a shared vision, strategy, and high-trust culture. I love coaching.
  • Identify opportunities for the team and create sufficient structure deliver results and measure impact (OKRs).
  • Drive product development during all stages of product lifecycle from ideation and proof of concept to sustainment. This includes finding market fit, product launch, scale motions, and deprecation strategy.
  • Gather customer and business insights through direct interaction, indirect sources, and data.
  • Create consensus by sharing technical, customer, and business context in audience-appropriate ways.
  • Represent my products and Microsoft with demos, speaking at conferences, interviews, and blogging.

I have domain expertise in:

  • Operating systems with emphasis on virtualization (VMs/containers), identity, security, and device management.
  • Kubernetes, container runtimes, and the container ecosystem, especially dev, ops, ISV/SI flows.
  • Edge, cloud, and hybrid compute patterns and problems from datacenter to IoT edge.
  • Enterprise IT in many verticals including regulated environments, cloud native developers, IoT SI and ISVs.
  • Cloud operations, with an emphasis on security and compute efficiency.
  • Partner management to create cross-company solutions.

My primary location is Seattle, WA. I’m happy working remotely or with a remote team and able to travel up to 50%.

Outside of work, I’m constantly remodeling my house, I read, hike, travel, teach, and cycle through different crafts.

Work Experience

Security Operations Engineering Lead – CISO protections team, Microsoft

September 2024 to Present

My team runs a cross-company program to protect the Trusted Computing Base (TCB) for Microsoft’s public cloud and supports our core responsibility as the incident response team via durable protections and through tenant policy. I have been directly responsible for operationalizing the TCB program based on a NorthStar vision with EVP and dCISO approval.

I hired a new team (5), started a weekly business review with participants from 10 business groups, integrated the TCB services list into the Secure Futures Initiative (SFI), defined the TCB community with different personas, began regular high-participation community calls, and have leaned on architects to establish an attacker mindset in the program.

Principal Program Manager Lead – Arc enabled AKS, Microsoft

May 2021 to September 2024

Azure Arc extends AKS from cloud to Edge. I led a 5 PM team to scale our in-market product. As our charter grew to new customer segments, my team strategically shifted from AKS in datacenters to IoT with AKS Edge Essentials. Internal polls show my team health and leadership confidence were above average for Microsoft and my org.

To drive rhythm of business and product quality, I led planning, shiproom for monthly updates, bug triage, quality reporting, and support flows. Planning has been my primary venue for developing Objectives the team believes in with ambitious but achievable Key Results based on our business and engineering reality (OKRs). We do retrospectives for the past semester OKRs and identify process gaps.

My passion project within our product team has been to encourage customer obsession. I created programs to gather feedback from early adopters, identify customers with near-term production goals, and map customer conversations to telemetry/product data so we could learn from their proof of concept to production journey. Working closely with key customers helped us identify customer patterns and verticals so we could focus our roadmap on high impact features. It also informed the resource balance between in-market features, incubation projects, and quality improvements.

Throughout my career I have taken time to mentor early in career technologists, teach, and help with hiring/recruiting. To date, my speaker scores are consistently high (4.7/5).

Senior Program Manager – HoloLens, Microsoft

April 2019 to May 2021

I owned the HoloLens 2 enterprise IT experience so when a customer buys hundreds of devices they can deploy, maintain, and secure them centrally. I built a roadmap for supporting and shipped semi-annual major releases with critical work for key HoloLens 2 customers and partners.

I brought my expertise in device management to the IVAS program ($22B) where there are similar device management requirements necessary to meet contract requirements to securely deploy on the tactical edge. Any IVAS improvement needs to pass rigorous security milestones, I have experience with STIG/FIPs requirements and SCA assessments.

Senior Program Manager – Hyper-V, Microsoft

December 2013 to April 2019

Hyper-V provides virtualization on Windows to create virtual machines, containers, and provide platform security. While in Hyper-V, I supported Azure (built on Hyper-V), small and medium business, large enterprise customers, and developers. My technical ownership was the boundary between virtual machines and the host operating system.

My highest impact work included:

  • The Windows Subsystem for Linux – this unlocked developer market share on Surface and Windows PCs in partnership with Canonical to have a native Ubuntu CLI experience.
  • Launching Windows containers internally and externally. Externally, I was responsible for our documentation in partnership with Docker to launch Windows containers. Internally, I helped M365, Azure Functions, Cosmos DB, and Azure Stream Analytics adopt a containerized compute platform to scale while reducing COGS.
  • Designing a socket-based guest-host communication channel to enable partners to build custom solutions. Ultimately this allowed numerous VSCode extensions and critical Azure fabric controls.

I care about community building. Externally, I blogged, spoke at conferences, and wrote technical documentation. Internally, I mentored and helped with Women in Base ERG.

Program Manager – SQL, Microsoft

September 2011 to December 2013

I helped define and develop a data-centric, interactive, HTML5/JS charting library to democratize data analytics. I owned documentation, represented the customer in design, facilitated cross-team collaboration, and roadmap planning.

Volunteer Work and Teaching

  • TEALS – Academy for Precision Learning, Teacher – December 2016 to July 2018
  • Society of Women Engineers - Saturday Academy, Computational Thinking Dinner, Various other SWE events
  • Computer Science Lab TA – OSU School of EECS – January 2009 to September 2011
  • Open Source Lab and Linux Users Group – Oregon State University – March 2006 to September 2011

Education

Oregon State University – Class of 2011 B.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering, B.S. Computer Science