Q&A with Ricky Liversidge: Adobe engages the Acrobat community
Director of Acrobat and Breeze product marketing says the company wants to hear “both the good and the bad” from customers

Editor's Note: Ricky Liversidge, talked with Kurt Foss, AcrobatUsers.com editor, about Adobe’s plans to help facilitate the development of local Acrobat user groups and to launch a corresponding website to support the company’s community-building effort.

Kurt Foss: "Before we talk in some detail about the new Acrobat User Community Initiative that you have been spearheading at Adobe, tell us a little about your background with Adobe, specifically with Acrobat."

Ricky Liversidge: "Following Adobe's recently completed acquisition of Macromedia, I am now the director of Acrobat and Breeze product marketing. I focus on the business and strategy side and drive the go-to-market strategies for the two product families.

I have been with Adobe for more than 10 years, nine of them in the 'field' as marketing director for different regions, including the UK, Asia Pacific and North America.

During that time, I have seen Acrobat go through a number of transitions — from the early days when we had to make the case to our customers about the need for a file format that was cross-platform and maintained document integrity to now when that is taken for granted and users are doing new and exciting things with Acrobat to enhance collaboration, security and so on. I have seen it come a long way.

I spent a lot of time out in remote sites listening to customers and trying to balance what Adobe is trying to do with what customers really need and want. That is in part why you are seeing this community-building drive from us at this time." 

Foss: "What was the impetus for launching the Acrobat User Community Initiative?"

Liversidge: "I always found it interesting when people would ask: 'What does Acrobat do?' If you were to try to answer from a purely horizontal business perspective, it was really hard to describe simply what Acrobat did. But if you had a lawyer come to you and ask 'What can it do for me?,' then Acrobat was much easier to explain from a 'show me from my perspective' approach.

It became obvious we needed to get much closer to our customers and others who are really influencing our business, and to adopt a ‘tell me exactly how I can use it and how I can benefit from it’ orientation to product development and marketing.

We realized our customers needed to connect with each other. There was a lot of expertise out there in the marketplace — Adobe has a certain amount of internal expertise, but it isn't scaleable around all of these different market areas, job functions or vertical industry segments. We needed to interact more directly and continually with the expertise in the global community. Both the company and our customers benefit from that.

Another lesson we learned — we had been trying to explain in words what Acrobat could do for customers. We came around to the strategy of 'show, not tell,' engaging the community to help us show how Acrobat could be successful within legal, marketing, engineering and other segments. Following this approach, we saw an uptake in Acrobat usage.

There has been a tendency in developing software to talk to the market only when you need to know something, and that isn't how you develop good products. Input comes in many, many different ways. Engaging with the market — and staying engaged — allows you to build up your development intelligence over a period of time, rather than saying 'Today's the day we ask our customers what they need.’ It's a much more engaging level of conversation we need to have with our customers and partners. I may be being critical, but I don't think — certainly on the Acrobat side — we were doing as good a job of that as we should." 

Foss: "Why this user community effort now, more than 12 years after Adobe introduced the world to Acrobat and PDF?"

Liversidge: "You could probably say there were certain points where we could have jumped in and done something sooner, and I think that would be absolutely a fair criticism. But why now? There is a lot of critical mass around Acrobat – it is  becoming very diverse in the way it is used within certain industries and certain job functions. The way you scale that is by engaging the market to provide support. It seemed like the timing was absolutely right. The feedback I am getting from customers when talking about the user group initiative is that we should have done this a while ago. We are getting it going now, that is the important thing.

This is really important to us. One thing we have talked about a lot is coming into this in a way we can sustain it. We are not the world's experts on running user groups or communities. We know a lot of stuff around Acrobat and PDF and technology.

We were really keen on first developing an advisory council group — we brought in Acrobat users and members of the community to help us define what this needs to look like and how we can develop and sustain it."

Foss: "What are Adobe's key objectives in developing closer interaction with the user community?"

Liversidge: "There are two key objectives:

First, connecting the user community helps it to share the wealth of information that's out there. In some of the areas in which people are working with Acrobat, users may be exploring certain functionality for the first time and going it alone. There is a wealth of information that can be shared. We get to see a lot of that, but it does not always get shared across the community. Connecting users to users, connecting users to resources, getting customers to really work together – that is really important.

Second, to get Adobe closer to our customers and closer to the Acrobat community so we can really understand what is going on — both the good and the bad. It is not all roses out there. Customers have difficult decisions to make and they have resources they have to balance. What we want to do is better understand those decisions."

Foss: "Can you talk a little more about what is in the Acrobat User Community for the average user: What are the benefits?"

Liversidge: "We are trying to give the user community a greater opportunity to engage with Adobe, whether directly or through other resources. It's that surrounding infrastructure that says 'You are not going alone with this.' We want to connect like-minded people together so they can share best practices, solutions they have come up with and so on. It is really about creating collective mass around Acrobat and PDF.

We want to help the customers get more out of that product and get over the challenges they face. People have made a significant investment in this technology, and it is important to us at Adobe, as it is to the customers, that they get the most out of it – in part by linking them to a lot of resources — tips, consultants, trainers and so on."

Foss: "Some may wonder about Adobe's leadership role in sponsoring an Acrobat user community — concerned that it will favor dissemination of favorable product marketing, be less receptive to criticism and exclude third-party vendors and solutions. Can you clarify Adobe's role and influence?"

Liversidge: "We have discussed from the beginning: How heavily should we get involved? What we feel is that whatever happens, it has to be driven by the customers. If Adobe plays an overly influential role, users will vote with their feet, and we will see less or no support with what we're trying to offer.

What we want to do is to enable this community to come together, to help build the foundation. Our interest is in really enabling the infrastructure and bringing it together.

What will drive its further development is not Adobe, but the customers and users. We have launched several new Acrobat user groups around North America and internationally during the past few months. We have had conversations with people interested in starting other new user groups. It will take off at the speed that the user community can develop and sustain.

I am willing to listen to good news and bad. Adobe has to change its behavior around that. We have to be prepared for people to say to us 'This isn't quite working, this isn't quite doing what you said it would' and be willing to act upon that. That is a little bit of a change for Adobe. It is something we are working toward. I really believe that the customers and users will not allow Adobe to be overly influential with this community or the user groups.

My own personal view is that I want Adobe to be a supporting partner in the development, but I also want users and customers to be able to engage us and to feel they have had a real conversation with Adobe rather than Adobe talking at them.

We are going to have to convince some at Adobe that this is an effort worth supporting. To date we are getting good support for our actions. Time will tell."

Foss: "As you mentioned, several new Acrobat user group chapters have already been formed, and we're hearing about strong interest in a number of other cities, as well as overseas. What is the expansion plan?"

Liversidge: "It’s not about the quantity, it's the quality. We do not want to rush to start 100 user groups and then not be able to support and engage with them in the way I think we need to. If we had around 20 really good, well-supported Acrobat user groups after a year — with more than half of those in the U.S. – I would be really happy with that."

Foss: "How will the AcrobatUsers.com website differ from some external sites that evangelize PDF-based technologies?"

Liversidge: "The difference in user preferences will likely be the same as why someone buys one magazine versus another — based on the quality and credibility of the editorial content and other factors people use to judge value. I would expect people to use whatever resources are at their disposal — they may use different sites for different purposes. The ideal thing is to give people a choice.

One difference may be that — as the site’s name suggests — the new community site will focus more on Acrobat, the product; it will also address and include Adobe PDF as a technology, but the file format will not be the focus."

Foss: "What is the awareness of and interest in the user community initiative among Adobe staff, particularly the Acrobat team? Will there be significant Adobe participation?"

Liversidge: "Within the Acrobat team and this business unit, there is a great deal of support for the community project. We will need to continue to strengthen that across the company's other business units – there is a lot of crossover among the range of Adobe products and solutions — to make sure we have good levels of support for the Acrobat community site."

Foss: "How will Adobe measure the success of this community-building effort?"

Liversidge: “Are customers satisfied with the investment they've made in our products and technologies and in the way they're able to engage with Adobe? That is the ultimate and most important measure."