Christian Cantrell
Product • Technology • Fiction

About

“Cross-functional” is the term I would say best describes me. From a management perspective, my core strengths are multidiscipline team building (design, development, product, and other stakeholders), leadership, dot-connecting, and reasoning from first-principles. But in both my personal and professional lives, it’s my proven history of iteration, execution, and ultimately shipping that I am most proud of.

Employment

Adobe (December 2002 - Present)

Director of Prototyping
Adobe Design
March 2015 - Present

The Adobe Design organization is in charge of user experience for all of Adobe’s products — desktop, web, and mobile. As Director of Prototyping, my job is to lead an international, multidisciplinary team through the product discovery and development life cycle. That means close collaboration with designers, product teams, researchers, engineers, and customers to rapidly iterate on, and ultimate validate, innovative new product directions.

Half of my twenty-two person team is hyper-focused on discrete user interactions like next-generation drawing tools and precise object manipulation in AR. The other half functions as a full-stack product incubator, designing, prototyping, and researching entirely new opportunities such as:

The Adobe Design Prototyping team even does “tech transfer” (integrating the features we prototype into shipping products), and public-facing production work like:

To learn more about the team I built and lead at Adobe, see Building to learn: the role of prototyping in Design.

Senior Engineering Manager
Web Platform
October 2011 - March 2015

Adobe’s creative tools and services address every available platform and medium: print, desktop, web, mobile, and even immersive mediums like AR and VR. Of all the platforms we target, the web was historically the slowest to evolve. Late in 2011, Adobe began working with Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Mozilla to help move the web forward faster. As Senior Engineering Manager inside Adobe’s Web Platform Group, I led an international team of designers and engineers focused on helping to define and showcase the newest web technologies. Working with partners like National Geographic, Food Network, and PBS Kids, we created several extremely engaging, web-based experiences to help define and validate new web standards.

Product Manager
Platforms
July 2006 - October 2011

As the Technical Product Manager for Adobe’s Flash, desktop, and Web Platforms, I was in charge of identifying requirements, defining APIs, and working with the developer community to help encourage platform adoption. The web, desktop, and mobile applications my team built helped validate platform direction, and were open-sourced to showcase new features and capabilities.

Product Manager
Developer Relations
December 2002 - July 2006

I spent my first four years at Macromedia and Adobe managing a subscription-based product called the Developer Resource Kit. Between releases, I spoke at conferences, contributed to the Java open-source community, and built and maintained Macromedia’s first blog and RSS aggregation platforms.


Amazing Media (July 1999 - December 2002)

Senior Engineering Manager

I started out at Amazing Media as a Java developer. When I left three and a half years later, I was managing the design and implementation of a large-scale digital advertising platform. Because I reported directly to the VP of Product, I also helped define product requirements, prioritize features, and I collaborated with partners such as eBay and Amazon.

Fiction

I double-majored in literature and creative writing in college, and in addition to my software career, I have carved out a successful niche for myself selling speculative fiction to studios and distributors like Fox 21, TriStar, and Hulu.

I expanded The Epoch Index into a novel which Random House will be publishing as Scorpion in the summer of 2021.

You can read (or listen to) a short story I wrote for Medium's Human Parts series called Negative Proof.

And finally, here's my IMDB page. It's still a little anemic, but growing.

Nonfiction

Between short stories and novels, I write about other things on my mind (usually technology-related). Here are a few of them:

Miscellaneous

Patents

With over two decades of experience in the software industry, I've accumulated a few patents (with several more waiting to get published):

Skills

A Few Interests

Social

Education

Bachelor of Arts
Literature and Creative Writing (double major)
June, 1995
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA

Contact

You can always DM me on Twitter. Or, you can email me at the address below. (Move the slider to decoded my email address.)

🐰 Easter Egg 🥚

To find an easter egg left especially for you,
start with the type of source you can view.