LinkedIn just made me aware that of my almost 28 years at Adobe, I’ve been in my current role for 10. 10 years! As those of you who know me know, that’s a long time for Mr. Needs Excitement Or Gets Bored.
I started (at Allaire, and then Macromedia, Inc.) as a technical product evangelist, and spent 7 years globetrotting supporting our customers, first ColdFusion, and then Flash/Flex, and more. I then (thanks to Michele Chambers Turner) led the growing evangelism team as Director of Developer Relations for about 7 “interesting” years (anyone remember the Flash vs. HTML5 excitement?), until I was asked to form a new team to focus on initial customer experience and success for the then new Creative Cloud offering.
And then in 2015 I gently (well, maybe not so gently) persuaded David Wadhwani to let me focus on younger users, starting with K-12 students and their teachers. There was no K-12 team back then, there wasn’t really an EDU team beyond a higher-education sales team, so with David’s blessing I joined Ely Greenfield and his small team who were working on an iPad app named Adobe Voice which was followed by Adobe Slate (later renamed Adobe Page), tools which were really well suited for younger users.
I was the one-person K-12 “team” back then; engaging educators online, visiting schools, demoing the apps, and trying to understand the role Adobe could, and should, play in education. I spent most of my time in classrooms and with teachers, and then buddied with Mohamed Elrefai to uplevel the conversations to education district and leadership levels.
At the same time, those little apps grew into something huge. Under the direction of Aubrey Cattell, the iPad apps gained a web counterpart and morphed into Adobe Spark which became the foundation of what is now Adobe Express.
And then things really picked up steam. Mala Sharma formed an actual EDU organization, and I joined her to build a team that could truly focus on educators and what they need to be successful in empowering their students with critical creativity, communication, and future ready skills.
I started hiring talented educators to expand our reach, and now lead a team of EDU rockstars who truly care about students and educators, and who come to work every day for all the right reasons, to make a meaningful difference and thus always put the kids first. For us it’s not just a job, it’s a mission. My team has been known to occasionally roll their eyes when I say it, but I remind them regularly that they don’t work for Adobe, they are employed by Adobe (and for that they should be grateful), but they work for our customers, and specifically young people whose lives and futures they can positively impact. Customers first always, especially when the customers are little people.
It’s a big deal, and we all take the mission and mandate seriously. Which is why 10 years have flown by, the longest I’ve ever been on any particular path, and why I’m in it for the next 10, at least. ❤️
Leave a Reply