Developer Focus (Adobe)
Driving change within the Web Platform community
Adobe was pivoting its direction from being the Flash company to being a leader of the Web Platform. I was asked to contribute to this initiative: create a content strategy, collaborate with representatives from key organizations, build community, and engineer measurement strategies.
- Innovation and Alignment: Identified and promoted of key content, features, libraries, and strategies aimed at fostering innovation in line with organizational goals.
- Community Engagement and Growth: Acted as a W3C Steward representative, recruited and managed relationships with influencers and contributors to WebPlatform.org.
- Data-Driven Decision-Making: Provisioned reports and analysis to track the progress of initiatives and features, using tools such as Excel, SQL, NLTK, Hive Query Language, and data visualization libraries such as Tableau, D3, and GreenSock GSAP.
Content creation by developing relationships
Moving from a content team into developer relations group meant working closer with evangelists, experts, and influencers.
- Managed content and delivery of articles, tutorials, samples, and videos.
- Managed relationships with expert contributors and site visitors.
Developer content is the interface made manifest
Without the experience of developers within their workflow, content is just API specs and marketectures. It was common at the time for tech writers to be expert at writing and content production tools. Instead, I built a team based on domain expertise: frontend developers who were users of the API. We then built or commissioned a set of proprietary tools and methods that dynamically pulled the most content out of the source. With a team of frontend experts and an efficient content pipeline, these content developers could spend their time actually using the API. Our rich content included examples, boilerplate code, and user workflow context.
- Content as an interface: We built content to be used in a forward-leaning manner, not just to be consumed while leaning back.
- Multi axis controllers for GUI: With a platform that was serving many product SKUs, we needed to provide just the right interface for each offering, all while maintaining a versioning support matrix. We developed a content pipeline that had a tagging model, post-compilation manipulation, customized documentation generation, and user controls. We were able to serve up just the right content for each product released.
- Continuous improvement: Used the latest in lean, agile, sigma six, and other measurable process improvement programs.
- Acting product manager: As my team grew to include documentation managers, I could focus on gathering requirements, developing strategies, and analysing systems, with the ultimate goal of creating the best possible content experience for our customers
User-centric content is usable content
Managed Platform and Languages content team: directed two managers, six writers, one developer, one language architect, and cyclical contractors in the production of core content and samples of ActionScript and JavaScript for AIR and the Flash Platform; delivered content into the Flex framework, Flash Professional Creative Suites, Dreamweaver, and various SaaS products.
- Award-winning content: Brought procedural writing to API docs.
- Collaboration with design and research: Contributed to usability and market research, designs, prototypes, and workflows aimed at improving the experience of Adobe developer and enterprise products.
- Innovative products: Flash Media Server (RTMP, 1-many broadcasting platform), Central (experimental app store), Flash Studio (cross-product integration), Flex Framework (early framework and reusable UI components for building dynamic frontend experiences), are examples of new product lines and technologies we documented.
- Real-life expertise: Recruited customers from community to contribute content and samples, building a revolving-door of innovation.