Adobe
Over the course of 17 years, my roles at Adobe evolved from designer to product manager to design manager, and ultimately to a design executive leading an incubation lab delivering digital media content for the publishing & entertainment industry for the last ten years.
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Design-led product innovation
Over the course of 17 years at Adobe, I gained experience in software product development from the perspective of marketing, product management, product design, and design leadership. I worked on product teams as the only designer, as well as in a large centralized design organization. After several years designing products such as Adobe Flash, Flex, and AIR, I noticed a trend: product teams tended to talk to the same customers each release, and often worked in silos without a broader perspective of the user's overarching needs. As such, I felt the company was often missing opportunities that nimble startups could swoop up.
Reporting to the VP of Design, I founded the Customer Engagements team within the Adobe Design organization and for the better part of a decade, I led a team of innovative designers, developers, researchers and producers who crafted unique, industry-changing solutions in partnership with major media companies. Our charter was to have our fingers on the pulse of industry and consumer trends, and to leverage a design-first approach to solve the creative problems of some of Adobe's most strategic partners, including Samsung, the New York Times, Condé Nast, and Scripps Networks (HGTV, Food Network).
Some of the most impactful projects I led were focused on helping newspaper and magazine publishers adapt their creative workflows to produce digital versions of their offerings. Our close partnership with WIRED, the New Yorker, and Martha Stewart Living led to the design and development of the first digital magazine readers and content for iPads and tablet devices, revolutionizing the publishing industry. My team grew to support the effort to productize our iniative, leading to $50 million in annual recurring revenue within 3 years time.
Prior to working in the centralized Adobe Design organization, I was responsible for managing Macromedia’s flagship product, Flash, through three major releases (Flash 4, Flash 5 and Flash MX) during the height of its popularity. I led user advocacy and customer advisory board initiatives, drove the user experience, designed and wrote feature specifications, and spoke at industry events and to the press. Prior to product management, I began my career at Macromedia leading design for the macromedia.com website.
TITLE
Director of User Experience
17
years (1997-2002, 2005-2017)
SCOPE
Strategic Partner Engagement, Product Innovation, Product Design, User Research
SEGMENT
Consumers, Strategic Partners, Magazine & Newspaper Publishers
$50m
ARR Revenue
750m+
Users Reached (including Flash and Digital Publishing products)
Project Niji
A modern layout tool for crafting rich, responsive experiences that scale to multiple channels
Professional storytellers and marketers need ways to rapidly create engaging, interactive content that scales to various screens and channels without resorting to boring, one-size-fits-all CMS templates. Project Niji was a next-generation browser-based content layout tool that produces clean, responsive HTML. It also integrated directly with WordPress and other CMS systems as well as supporting the ability to reach syndication channels such as Facebook Instant Articles, Google AMP and Apple News. The tool was powerful enough for a professional designer, yet simple enough for a content producer to use.
Partners:
Garden & Gun Magazine, Sasaki Associates, Charity: Water
Sample Article:
Boston Sea Change
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Mobile
A modern mobile content viewer for publishers to reach readers everywhere
Publishers and brands need a mobile platform that allows them to reach customers on whatever device they may be in front of, and in a quick, responsive manner. We led an effort to disrupt Adobe’s own market-leading Digital Publishing Suite (see below) and provide solutions that were more in tune with how today's readers were consuming content: bite-size snacking, predominantly on mobile phones rather than tablets or desktop, article-based rather than issue-based, and with a freemium business model. We identified Fast Company as our pilot customer and crafted a custom iOS phone/tablet app in collaboration with their editorial team. We then generalized our learnings from the engagement and formed the framework for AEM Mobile (successor to Adobe DPS), introduced in 2015.
Partner:
Fast Company
Adobe Digital Publishing Suite
A complete solution for individual designers, traditional media publishers, ad agencies, and companies of all sizes that want to create, distribute, monetize, and optimize engaging content and publications for tablet devices
With the advent of new touch-enabled mobile devices, we identified an opportunity to help publishers leverage their existing creative workflows with Adobe InDesign and other Creative Suite products to produce interactive versions of their magazines and publications. This involved defining what the consumer’s reading experience for a digital magazine should be, as well as what types of interactive content should be made possible. I formed a close partnership with an industry leader (WIRED) and together we set out to define the future of magazines. We also selected two additional launch partners (New Yorker and Martha Stewart Living) to ensure that the solution we were creating would cover a broad spectrum of content publishers and readers.
I had the opportunity to debut our vision for digital magazines in a TED Talk in February 2010. Soon afterwards, with the official announcement of the iPad, WIRED became one of the first digital magazine apps available on the newly released iPad (and featured by Steve Jobs at Apple's WWDC conference). Adobe dominated the digital magazine market with the solution that we built out of these early engagements growing to $50+ million in ARR, making it one of the company's rare organic growth success stories.
Partners:
WIRED, New Yorker, Martha Stewart Living
New York Times Reader 2.0
A custom cross-platform desktop application for online and offline reading of the New York Times
NYT wanted a truly cross-platform desktop app solution to replace a Windows-only application that was previously built by Microsoft and did not scale or accurately reflect their brand. We worked closely with the Times’ Design and R&D teams to craft a solution built on top of Adobe AIR that worked identically on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms as well as smaller mobile notebooks. The application would download all of the paper’s news for the day, as well as late-breaking updates throughout the day if the user was online. Content was rendered using NYT’s custom fonts, and the columns of text scaled and paginated gracefully even as one resized the application window or increased or decreased the font size (a solution later termed ‘responsive design’). In addition to news articles, the application featured an interactive crossword puzzle, video news content, a list of most-emailed articles, and a unique ‘browse mode’ allowing users to zoom out of the current article and gain visual context as to where they were at in the grand scheme of the day’s paper. The solution was then generalized for two additional newspapers and a strategy built around how to productize.
Partners:
New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Boston Globe
Adobe Platform UX / Partner Engagements
Leadership of a team responsible for the user experience of Adobe (and previously Macromedia) Flash, Flex and AIR platforms, as well as ownership of design/UX for all partner showcase applications
I led a team responsible for defining the user experience for Adobe’s platform authoring and runtime technologies (including Flash and AIR) and supporting product team/feature design needs. With Adobe AIR quickly becoming a big focal point for the company, much of our focus shifted to working directly with strategic media partners where my team provided design/UX leadership for showcase applications built on the platform. Many of these applications were promoted with co-marketing arrangements with these technology and media partners and at industry events.
Partners:
Samsung, CNN, MTV, MLB, BBC, NBC, CBS, FOX, Disney, DirecTV, Comcast, Scripps Networks, QNX, Facebook, Blackberry, FedEx, Deutsche Bank, Lonely Planet
