Overview
Strong user experience skills in a product management role are a secret weapon I leverage daily. Design + product management skills are HIGHLY valuable and essential in delivering functional and delightful products.
In this presentation, learn about Adobe's design organization structure and skills, as well as focus on two areas that can differentiate them from other designers. For designers interested in product management roles, understand how design skills can be leveraged in a PM role and learn how I successfully transitioned from experience design to product management.
I am a working artist and designer with 28+ years of experience working at Adobe in multiple roles, including quality assurance, experience design, and product management.
Over the years, I have worked on desktop, web, and phone applications, each with a creative & business focus. I love the intersection of design, technology, problem-solving, and working with talented people to achieve common goals.
My education is from Washington State University. In 1994, I received a BFA in Graphic Design. The following year, I pursued an MBA. Unfortunately, business school was the right thing at the wrong time, and I did not finish. Instead, I switched master's programs and started an MFA in Visual Communications. As an MFA graduate student, I worked at the Center for Teaching & Learning (3 years) and taught graphic design (331 and 332) to undergrads for 2 years.
While at WSU, I gained a strong foundation in design principles, with and without digital courses. The MFA program offered the opportunity to enroll in classes all over the university, including architecture, interior design, information systems, marketing, and mechanical engineering.
After graduation in 1997, I was hired as part of Adobe’s college hire program with approximately 70 other college graduates. My first role at Adobe was as a senior quality assurance engineer working on Photoshop in San Jose, CA. While on the team, I tested the Type tool, animated GIF builder, and Adjustment Layers in English and Japanese versions of Photoshop 5.5.
Design as a career or discipline wasn’t a realistic option at Adobe in 1997. Photoshop was an engineering-focused organization, hence no viable opportunity to pursue a design role, especially with no on-the-job experience. I was offered a tremendous opportunity to work on Photoshop, a program I used and taught for years. My first year at Adobe was a lot of learning, including how to navigate the corporate environment, the discipline of quality assurance, and how to apply my fine arts and design background to software engineering. Adobe has been an amazing place to learn and grow.
I worked in the quality engineering career track for around 9 years, perhaps longer than intended. It was easier to stick with what I knew, all while learning what I could about the experience design career track. Even though quality assurance wasn't my dream career, I was very good at it and gained invaluable experience as a people manager and with engineering, software development processes, and indirectly, experience design. The point is, often one can gain super-important career skills in unexpected and unintended areas of work.
It took a lot of time, patience, networking, and luck to get on the right career track, from quality assurance to experience design to product management. There were reorgs, products were canceled, layoffs, and life events – life is messy - you can’t control it all...If you are trying to get your foot in the door or get to a specific place, Be patient, but also start with “yes”. Demonstrating a passion for the subject matter and working hard to learn new skills helps open a lot of doors.
Take the job that isn’t the job you’re dreaming of or looking for, but can help lead to it, gain the experiences and learning available, and seek out a mentor who can help guide you.
Product management (PM) roles can vary from company to company and role to role, but the general concept of the PM role connecting customers, technology, and business is universal at Adobe.
Product management is a leadership role that requires constant identification and articulation of goals, strategic thinking, development of tools and processes, and management of workflows. Product Managers inspire teams to perform, often lofty goals. Below are my top 6 primary activities as a product manager and the percentage of time I spend on each activity over a week.
I have relative involvement with different activities and teams working on shipping features in a PM role. What’s awesome is that some of you likely already have some or even many of these skills, but it’s important to know that success in product management requires ability across all of these dimensions.
My day-to-day as a Product Manager on the Photoshop team
I currently work with 3 scrum teams, managing features ranging from typography features, AI selections, Illustrator to Photoshop interoperability, Guides, and filters.
On a daily basis, I do research, meet with customers, write requirements, work in JIRA creating epics and stories, work with design, groom the backlog with the devs, present to prerelease, and work with product marketing, documentation, and release engineering.
After a feature ship, I dive into data analytics to track usage and work with support to track usability or other technical problems.
Each PM specialization is important; however, even if you are a UX or Technical PM, skills and decisions that drive the business are critical. It may be obvious, but the key to most products’ success is delivering amazing USER EXPERIENCES (goes across all PM specializations). Having a strong foundation in design thinking makes the research --> design --> development ,--> test cycle much more efficient.
How did I make the leap from experience design to product management? NETWORK, NETWORK, NETWORK – In 2006, the project was canceled, and my team was redeployed (moved to other projects). I was given 6 months to find another job within the company. I immediately reached out to a design manager and said you can use me as a free resource, who is willing to work hard, for the opportunity to learn. The 6 months of experience enabled me to get hired by an engineering team in Seattle, working as a beginner experience designer.
I spent the next 8 years as the only experienced designer, learning not only experience design but also some key product management skills, such as how to perform customer interviews and get customer validation, create mock-ups, prototypes, and specs, learn about branding, marketing, requirements, and work with the devs from start to ship.
I worked on many projects you have never heard of...some fizzled, some canceled, the right thing at the wrong time, the wrong thing, and the wrong time. The right thing at the right time, with the right leadership. It is important to stay flexible!
I was offered the opportunity to move from the dev team to a PM role. It was a good transition because I already had many PM-type responsibilities.
Within a year, I was reorganized to join a completely different team and business (Experience Cloud—AEM Mobile) as a user experience product manager.
I transitioned from doing 100% design to 70% design --> 30% PM work. My title changed to user experience product manager on a technical product. Over time, my responsibilities transitioned from 95% product management to 5% design (PM comps).
As a user experience product manager, I partnered with some of the best UX designers at Adobe. As a team, we focused on applying design principles/heuristics to a highly technical product, aiming to make it approachable and intuitive for a wide range of customers.
A primary function of a user experience product manager is applying design thinking and a problem-solving approach that emphasizes empathy for the end-user, creative ideation, and iterative prototyping. This human-centered methodology involves understanding the needs, motivations, and behaviors of the people who will use a product and using that understanding to create innovative solutions that meet those needs.
1. Empathy: Understanding the people who will be using the product, service, or system, their needs, desires, and behaviors.
2. Definition: Defining the problem and identifying the design challenge.
3. Ideation: Generating ideas and potential solutions to the problem.
4. Prototyping: Creating a tangible representation of the proposed solution in order to test and refine it.
5. Testing: Gathering feedback and insights from users to refine the design further.
Human-centered design and design thinking are two related but distinct approaches to problem-solving that prioritize understanding and empathizing with the end user. Human-centered design is a specific approach to designing solutions that prioritizes empathy and understanding for the end user, while design thinking is a broader problem-solving approach that incorporates human-centered design as one of its key elements.
On the Experience Platform team, I was partnered with a technical PM to help envision a high-level user experience and tie that experience to the overall UI framework of the product. The technical PM drove the technical requirements, and the user experience product manager drove the user experience requirements by partnering with an experience designer. It was a complex model, but it was highly successful.
PMs and UX need to work closely together to ensure that the products they are creating meet user needs, are technically feasible, and can be delivered on time and within budget. The overlapping hard skills can help facilitate collaboration and efficiency between these two roles.
Accessibility is a skill that can differentiate you from others, no matter the role. I worked on an accessibility project on Experience Platform for 2+ years and have a deep understanding of the benefits. Below are high-level points of what accessibility is.
ACCESSIBILITY = EQUAL ACCESS
Accessibility is essential for providing equal access to software for individuals with disabilities, who make up about 20% of the global population. It allows people with visual, auditory, or physical impairments to use the software effectively.
Accessibility goes beyond traditional input methods like the mouse and keyboard, enabling the use of assistive technologies such as VoiceOver and Zoom controls. It also ensures that the user interface has sufficient contrast for low-vision and colorblind users and that the product functions properly when zoomed to 200%.
WCAG documents, or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, serve as the driving force behind accessibility in software. These internationally recognized standards provide specific criteria and techniques for making web content more accessible and ensuring equal access for people with disabilities. WCAG covers aspects such as perceivability, operability, understandability, and robustness to cater to the needs of all users.
Storytelling is a key skill for UX and PM—people who are good at this get jobs. What makes a good storyteller? Usually, a great approach and delivery. A good storyteller captivates their audience through the artful combination of engaging narrative, relatable characters, vivid imagery, and compelling emotions, weaving a tale that resonates and lingers in the minds and hearts of listeners.
Below are examples of visual work I have done while working in my PM role. Examples are internal communications (managing out and managing up), display of data, and mockups for management buy-in. Diagrams to explain complex technical ideas and workflows.
There are also some examples of external communications, such as Adobe blogs and social media.
Created and delivered product-wide data analytics strategy for Experience Platform. Development of Customer Data Dashboards in Adobe Analytics.
This customer data usage work helped on the business/customer side – customers are leveraging all capabilities, which are stuck and need a solution architect's help. Customers are in jeopardy of canceling because of low perceived value/usage.
Workflow diagrams (sometimes referred to as journey maps) are extremely powerful, especially when partnering with a technical PM. They tell the story of the stages of a specific user type or persona's workflow toward achieving an overarching goal.
Research is all centered around the user to understand real-world user goals, needs, and frustrations.
• User personas
• Jobs-to-be-done
• Workflow diagrams
To create an infographic or visual diagram, you need to understand every part of the process. When I create these types of visuals, I can see areas that are inefficient and can work toward the most efficient solution.
These visuals can often also be used to give a high-level overview of technology without having to know or understand the entire system.
