Profile

More than 10 years experience product management and design with emphasis on web and mobile platforms, consumer, and developer software. Proven ability to identify successful new product opportunities, reinvigorate and grow existing product lines, set a long-term strategy consistent with brand promise, and champion a product internally and externally. Strong technical skills combined with business acumen.

Professional Highlights

Product Management

• Managed web developer products for Nokia covering 85% of the addressable developer market. Created first four generations of Nokia Web SDK with a team spread over three continents. These products are essential components of Nokia's complete, industry-leading mobile developer offerings.
• Created eBay Blogs to enhance eBay’s renowned community and drive significant natural search traffic through community-created, persistent, rich content. Buyers and sellers used eBay Blogs to enhance their credibility, trustworthiness, and reputation while eBay enjoys increased time on site and transaction volumes.
• Redesigned eBay’s Product Description Pages to drive a $1.8M annual increase in transaction activity and significant increases in page views via natural search.
• Managed all phases of the product life cycle on time and within budget for three consecutive releases of Adobe SVG Viewer, including market ( MRD ) and product requirement ( PRD ) documents and product integration with Adobe’s authoring tools and servers including Illustrator, InDesign, GoLive and Graphics Server.
• Developed a licensing and distribution strategy for Adobe SVG Viewer, including third-party distribution with partners such as RealNetworks, establishing more than 166 million seats (38% market penetration) installed over approximately 14 months.
• Turned 300 unique support contracts with non-standard terms worth more than $225M into three standard contracts to ensure Sun could meet the contractual obligations to its Java source licensees. Created royalty and support revenue forecasts.

• Led a cross-functional team to improve the out-of-box experience by simplifying the product installation, increasing customer satisfaction and converting more evaluations into purchases, and saving Microtec more than $250,000 annually.
• Created the prototype and wrote the feature requirements for Microtec’s first on-line documentation system which increased usability and reduced the cost of documentation by 23%.
• Increased Microtec’s support renewal revenue by 15% in one year.

Evangelism

• Represented Adobe at conferences and seminars such as Seybold, Builder.com, and FlashForward. Awarded the Adobe Customer Briefing Center’s Quarterly Top Presenter and Speaker of the Year awards.
• Created an early adopter community to inform and inspire developers by communicating Adobe strategy, delivering announcements, and gathering requirements to establish Adobe’s product leadership.
• Managed staff of five to create and evolve a developer network ( www.adobe.com/svg) including demos, whitepapers, and authoring guides to educate and inspire SVG technology adoption.
• Served as Adobe’s Marketing liaison to the World Wide Web Consortium ( W3C) ensuring that Adobe’s messages were congruent with the W3C.

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Employment History

Lead Product Manager, Web Tools

Managed Nokia’s first set of web tools starting from a blank slate. The full suite of web tools now includes: Nokia Web SDK [video], Web SDK Simulator built with Qt WebKit, Nokia Designer, Nokia Web Runtime plug-in for Eclipse, WRT extension for Adobe Dreamweaver and WRT plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio. These tools enable the full life cycle of rich mobile application development, from concept and ideation to publishing. Challenges included aligning diverse and sometimes conflicting requirements and roadmaps for every device and most services in Nokia’s portfolio. An innovator in mobile web technology, Nokia was the first to ship a WebKit-based browser on mobile devices, beating Apple to market by two years. Nokia’s web platform includes APIs enabling web developers to create rich mobile applications.

Provided guidance on how to move the product-line to the next level including product and process definition, requirements development and roadmaps. Recommended changes to product usability, accessibility, and development processes for Assist Guide Information Services and other companies.

Senior Product Manager

Conceived and launched new products that created a competitive advantage based on Adobe Flex, a Yahoo! Map mashup, and populated by a combination of in-house and third-party data ( patent pending). Developed a platform for a new line of business focused on advertising.

Senior Product Manager, Internet Marketing & Community

Launched new products, such as eBay Blogs and redesigned the Product Description pages, to enhance the eBay Community and maximize natural search traffic and decrease eBay’s paid search expenditure.

Consulted for a number of companies on a variety of product management and marketing areas including: Adobe, BEA, enScaler, Ideaburst, Open Design Alliance, and Software Mechanics.

Senior Product Manager And Evangelist

Managed the course of the Adobe SVG Viewer, of the Adobe SVG Viewer, a browser plug-in similar to Adobe Flash. As SVG Evangelist, influenced the Creative Suite-SVG authoring features and created a vibrant developer community. Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is the W3C ’s XML -based language for scriptable 2D vector graphics that enables data-driven graphics for for web, mobile and print, and is now supported natively in all popular web browsers.

Product Manager, Java Source Licensee Engineering

Managed an engineering services product and provided customer relations and advocacy by serving as the liaison among the engineering, legal, and sales organizations.

Project Manager Marketing

Managed a compiler and IDE product, including introduced new licensing programs, and served as Lead Auditor for ISO 9000 registration for Microtec’s Integrated Development Environments ( IDE) and a Real-Time OS.

Training/Technical Support

Developed and delivered course materials, provided end user and developer support, and produced and edited end-user and developer manuals and marketing materials for Globetrotter’s license-management products for enterprise and software publishers.

Product Manager for compiler licensing, served as the FrameMaker Guru and developed tools and scripts for document development and technical editor for developer documentation.

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Education, Certifications, Publications, and Awards

• Certified ScrumMaster, cPrime 2011
• U.S. Patent Pending 60/950,102 “Method and Apparatus For Visualizing and Optimizing Message Transfer in Reputation Networks,” Bierman et al., July 16, 2007
• Bachelor of Arts; California State University, Northridge
• Dean’s List for Computer Forensics coursework/ Computer Science Program, College of San Mateo 2004
• Mediation Certification, California Community Dispute Resolution
• CTM Award; ToastMasters International
• Cagle, Kurt, foreword by Bierman, Michael; SVG Programming. Berkeley: Apress, July 2002
• Award for Excellence, Society for Technical Communication Style Guide 1994
• ISO 9000 Lead Auditor Certification
• Adobe Customer Briefing Center’s Quarterly Top Presenter and Speaker of the Year awards 2001

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Activities

• Founder: www.AdobeAlumni.com AdobeAlumni on LinkedIn
• Moderator: Software Product Marketing Discussion

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