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
Experience Development
Adobe Design
March 2015 - Present
The Adobe Design organization is in charge of user experience for all of Adobe’s products — desktop, web, mobile, and immersive. As Director of Experience Development and head of Adobe Design Prototyping, my job is to lead an international, multidisciplinary team through the product discovery and development life cycles. That means close collaboration with designers, product teams, researchers, engineers, and customers to rapidly iterate on, and ultimately validate, innovative new product directions.
Half of my twenty-one 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 also 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
In late 2011, Adobe began working with Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Mozilla to help move the web forward. As Senior Engineering Manager inside Adobe’s Web Platform Group, I led a 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 experiences to help define and validate new web standards.
- My talk at Google I/O on New Web Tools and Advanced CSS/HTML5
- Making the Web Sweeter with Food Network and Cupcakes
- The Future of Responsive Digital Layout
Product Manager
Platforms
July 2006 - October 2011
As 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 (later acquired by 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.
- ‘Brainbox’ Series In Works At Hulu From Christian Cantrell & Fox 21; David Kajganich Tapped As Showrunner
- TriStar, Escape Artists Producing “Crichton-esque” Female Fronted Thriller With Daniel Kunka Scripting
- Fox Lands ‘Epoch Index;’ Brad Peyton Directs, Matt Reeves Producing, Justin Rhodes Scripting
I expanded The Epoch Index into a novel which Random House will be publishing as Scorpion in May of 2021, and which has already received an extremely positive review from Publishers Weekly.
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:
- Building to learn: the role of prototyping in Design (UX Collective)
- The Universal Ecosystem (UX Collective)
- A deep dive into the Surface Duo’s virtual keyboard (UX Collective)
- Twelve things Microsoft should know about Windows 10 (that Windows users won’t tell them) (The Mission)
- When you work for your software instead of your software working for you (UX Collective)
- The Case for Defying Good Advice (The Startup)
- We Get the Monopolies We Deserve: How consumers can help stop anti-competitive corporate behavior (without government intervention) (Medium)
- If you wait for VR to be ready, you will have waited too long (The Mission)
- The Future is Disappearing (Salon)
- Digital Dark Matter (TechCrunch)
- Why Sound Is Digital Design’s Fourth Dimension (Fast Company)
- Why We Love Objects With Moving Parts (Fast Company)
- Why Tomorrow’s Best Digital Experiences Will Feel Analog (Fast Company)
- Everything You Need To Know About AMP (Smashing Magazine)
- Why Cross-platform Literacy Matters (SitePoint)
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):
- Edit experience for transformation of digital content
- Web page reflowed text
- Synchronized content display across a plurality of devices
- Optimizing application compiling
- Application compiling
- Bundled mobile/desktop application package
- Biometric adjustments for touchscreens
- Application debugging
- Adding functionality with respect to one or more web pages
- System and method for ranking information based on click throughs
- Advertising application services system and method
- System and method for enabling user control of online advertising campaigns
Skills
- People, project, and product management
- Multi-stakeholder collaboration (jargon for "team-building")
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Prototyping:
- Prototyping at Adobe
- Surface Duo keyboard:
- Explorations of new AI-powered workflows:
- Intent Buffering
- The iPhone, Fixed
- NPR Ninja
- Webright
- Responsive Digital Layout
- Colify
- A Text Layout Engine Written in JavaScript
- Better E-book Reading Experiences
- Animation with HTML and JavaScript
- Accessing Motion Sensors in JavaScript
- The Keyboard from TRON: Legacy
- (So many more that I can't share publicly 🤐)
- User experience design
- Scrum, Kanban, and Lean methodologies
- Mac, Windows, and Linux
- iOS and Android
-
Writing, presenting, and communication:
- My 2012 talk at Google I/O
- I wrote the new Adobe Design mission statement
- See Nonfiction section
- Image, video, and audio editing
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Software development:
- HTML, JavaScript, and CSS
- React and Redux
- LAMP stack
- Java and Python
- Amazon Web Service
- AI and ML
- Git, SVN, CVS, and Perforce
- Reasoning from first-principles (and generally getting stuff done). For example, at Adobe, it’s notoriously difficult to launch a new public-facing site, but over the course of a year, my team either contributed to, or completely managed, the launch of three entirely new web properties:
A Few Interests
- Orchid Horticulture
- Public Radio / News Aggregation
- Audio Engineering:
- Photography
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.