Charles Myers

This site is the culmination of 18 months of work for PM, UX, and the engineering team.

We began this with a story map and mockups in Cordova/Phonegap and rapidly realized that mobile app development was too slow for building early functionality. We pivoted to a mobile-responsive front end, based on React.

Technologies used in this include AWS and React, as we built our own platform for chat as well as integration with InContact for voice. We implemented our own content repository and content authoring, which let us build the technology for user-focused decision trees (guided paths).

Product Management tools used in this effort include story maps, roadmaps, as well as normal user story writing, standups, reviews. We moved from a 4-week Scrum to Scrumban so that we could be much more responsive to emerging business needs while engineering had a predictable pattern.

During this period, I was responsible for managing product management, engineering, customer support, and sales support of the existing products as well as the effort on this new product area.

While the Web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) provide standards for creating accessible content, much of this content is not findable. A major challenge for a person with specific needs is to find content that has the accessibility features that they need, whether well-understood features like closed captioning to very specific attributes such as tactile aids for people with sight and hearing issues.

The goal of the accessibility metadata initiative was to bring together accessibility experts around the globe to determine the best metadata vocabulary and to bring this to schema.org for general adoption.

I was responsible for coordinating meetings of the 10-12 people involved, running clear meetings with agendas and notes. I then drove these discussions and efforts to clear conclusions, authoring them on our marketing website, gathering partners to build proofs-of-concept of the technology, marketing the effort in social media and our blog, and finally driving a specification into schema.org. I also presented at various Learning Resource Metadata Initiative events.

My experience in standards organizations, such as the W3C, and having an open process were essential in driving this project to a successful conclusion.

Adobe, starting with the release of Acrobat 4 (Distiller server) and 5 (Adobe Graphics Server and Adobe Document Server) had begun a server product line. These products were point products and did not work together. We also had aspirations of bringing the document and form technology of Output Server and Form server together in this, along with a document workflow system and workbench for unifying the design of the components.

The best customer description of our products and aspirations was "you have a bag of doorknobs, and I want a unified product suite to solve my document processing issues." This was a stretch for Adobe, as we had typically sold just creative tools.

Another product manager in Ottawa and I took on the role of driving the business case, selection of product approach and agile epic requirements estimation as a six-month two-phase effort, in a true DACI sense. We worked with engineering, marketing, and sales to determine the best product mix and the SAM/SOM estimates. This cross-functional process touched all parts of the organization, including learning systems and customer support, all who had new enterprise requirements brought upon them.

We succeeded to get this developed and launched.

Adobe was faced with ebook competition and threats to the PDF franchise. I led an effort to both defend and expand our offering.

We took the following approaches:
• Assessed the competitive threat and realized that Adobe, while not the only player in the space, could stake out a leading position for highly formatted and technical books. This was essential

• Surveyed internal candidates for Digital Rights Management and decided on PDF Merchant. We also had competition from mobile devices and developed a reflowable PDF infrastructure that could produce reflowable and accessible content, even on mobile Windows and Palm platforms.

• Developed a set of partners across the value chain, from publishers, distributors, retailers, and device manufacturers to announce jointly with Adobe.

• Looked at future partners and acquisitions, setting up a relationship with Glassbook, who was later acquired.

• Product-managed the development of the server and acrobat DRM plugins

• Launched this technology in keynotes at the Seybold Seminars and Electronic Book '99, as well as various press interviews and articles and other presentations.