Adobe Character Animator - Senior Product Manager
The vision was an app producing animation driven by the movements, voice, and triggered behaviors of the animator. As the Senior Product Manager for Adobe Character Animator, I brought this pioneering piece of research from Beta to full app status in the Adobe portfolio. It let you use your laptop camera and mic on a Photoshop document to make cartoons driven by your face, voice, gestures, and pre-animated sequences in real time. Honestly, it’s pretty wonderful. It’s now a part of the Adobe creative suite used by the best individual animators and studios around the world.
I worked to understand the needs of users at major studios and animators in garages and dorm rooms, translating diverse workflows, technical limitations, skill levels, and collaborations into a prioritized feature roadmap for designers engineers. All while maintaining the goals of the business and “productizing” new Adobe research.
I made sure the user was present in our every move and that the spirit of fun, so pervasive in animation. was maintained, as animation became a real-time process, driven by the emotion and expression of the user in the particular moment.
content in the app - Adobe Senior Business Development Manager and Senior Product Manager
In this Adobe-wide strategic initiative, the vision that I focused on was one of immediate user access to the best content - within the primary interface of the application. I worked as a Senior Business Development Manager and Senior Product Manager, on delivering in-app content and features that facilitate immediate creativity, wherever the user happens to be in their video creation workflow. As a result of this effort, the user never has to leave the Adobe ecosystem to complete their work, with the content the project demands.
In the trend-gobbling world of online video creation, content, as always, is king. But the king is an alien with a crown of light and a scepter that shoots waves of sound. In other words, it’s evolving at the pace of users’ imaginations and their expectations are very high. For apps aimed at being creation platforms, this means that a user who has to leave your ecosystem to find the content they want may never come back when they do.
Leveraging a decade of content creation (I founded, ran, and sold a digital creative studio) and with a proven record of making, commissioning, and licensing content for diverse markets (at Adobe and as CMO at Whole Foods Market), I was tapped to negotiate the treacherous world of content strategy for Adobe video. This included the operational parts of the strategy like commissioning original content, enabling user-generated content, and standing up content licensing. In this work, I prioritized development roadmaps and delivered assets and features that dramatically expanded usage for apps.
But what I’m thinking about now isn’t where to get the next asset, but how content assets work and evolve with the user and trends in a way that maximizes relevance, longevity, and impact of a given content type. I think we can do this by using AI and the data graph to make the asset a living thing, that responds to user and environmental needs through an active dialogue with the smart asset.