Adobe interview: Rick Brown, Group Product Manager for Acrobat
Guides product management team, represents voice of the customer in product development
by Kurt Foss, Editor, AcrobatUsers.com

Kurt Foss: Can you briefly describe some of the roles and responsibilities you've had at Adobe Systems?

Rick Brown: “I joined the company in June 1994, so I've been here more than 11 years. I was the public relations manager when we launched Acrobat version 2.0 and was in the same role for version 3. I then transitioned into a product management role. For a while I was the product manager for a couple other products — PageMill and PageMaker — and eventually joined the Acrobat product team. I have been a product manager working on Acrobat since version 5.”

Foss: What are the primary duties and focus of your current job?

Brown: “Currently I'm the Group Product Manager for Acrobat — there is a group of product managers that report to me. The way we work is that you either have a functionality responsibility, such as forms, or you might have more of a vertical market focus, such as architecture, engineering or construction (AEC) or manufacturing. We have people who have domain expertise in those functions and areas.

My role includes making sure we're prioritized, that we're focusing on the functionality that provides the most benefit, and that we're meeting our schedules. I work with the engineering team, facilitating the development staff to build the best possible product by representing the voice of the customer to them, and making sure that the product they're building is what the customers need.”

Foss: Tell us a little about the product-development process.

Brown: “When we're approaching the development of the product, we typically look at a couple areas. One of the biggest benefits we provide is related to any horizontal business process that's document intensive, such as review and approval. We also look at industries and job functions where there are very document-intensive processes.

One of our newer areas of focus has been in the legal profession, which is an area that we've been spending a lot of time in lately and an area where you can expect some future product enhancements and developments. By legal profession, I don't just mean law firms — we're also looking at a legal function inside a company and how that integrates with regulatory and government requirements. There's a very interesting food chain of parties, whether they be within a company or a government agency. There are lots of requirements to very effectively communicate documents and manage them through a legal process.”

Foss: In addition to the legal industry, what are some other key markets Adobe has identified for special focus, and what's the process for getting to understand their issues and needs?

Brown: “A couple other areas we're looking at are AEC and manufacturing. They tend to have a very distributed set of people interacting with each other. In manufacturing, you have a distributed supply chain with very disparate levels of technical capability and infrastructure. When we looked at how they communicate — forms, design information, information related to a manufacturing or design process — it was clear they needed some technology that could span all the various players. The cross-platform capability and ubiquity of PDF became really important.

That's a process, particularly in the design phase, where there's communication of very critical intellectual property. When a manufacturer is communicating to its supply chain about a new product, being able to control intellectual property related to that design is very important to them. They tend to keep very tight wraps on those things until they come to market. The characteristics of PDF and the additional capabilities we can layer on top of that — basic encryption up through more sophisticated things like the digital rights management (DRM) capabilities of our LiveCycle Policy Server — are especially important to their market.

The ways we try to understand those customers — we spend a lot of time talking with them about their business processes — not so much about where's the best place to apply our technology, but what's really going to get to the heart of the business issue.

For example, a big issue in manufacturing is control of their intellectual property through the design-and-manufacturing phase across a distributed supply chain. There are lots of issues there, but we want to know what is the most critical customer business problem and how can we apply the technology to add value. With a horizontal application like forms, you have to talk to a much more diverse set of customers because forms are used in very scaleable ways, from ad hoc, unstructured ways up to highly managed, structured business processes where some of our LiveCycle technology can be applied. It's a matter of understanding that customer at every level to understand what's the pain point in that process — when you're trying to get something done, where are you feeling the most pain and how can we help alleviate that through the application of our technology?”

Foss: Tell us more about the ways you interact with and/or gather feedback from current or prospective customers, or different market segments — particularly as it relates to new or enhanced product features?

Brown: “The fun part of product management is understanding the customer requirements and pain, and then translating that into the design of the product. Software development has become a much more iterative process. Five years ago, you tended to gather the customer information, and then go back to work to build a product and then ship it. Then the customer would work with it and give feedback and then you'd iterate again. But that tended to have fairly long cycles — 18 to 24 months.

We've been benefiting in part because the company is seeing the technology applied now in so many ways. It's not just Acrobat any more, it's Acrobat and the LiveCycle products, and now you see things like Flex and Flash being used in the context of rich Internet applications.

We now have a much greater feedback loop and we're able to do internally a lot more iterative development — we can do prototypes, for example, and work with customers and get feedback on that and do a lot more iteration before we ship something. We're spending a lot more time in that front-end of the process so that we're better understanding the customer requirements and fine-tuning it before we ship. We've been a little more aggressive on the product cycle. I think we got Acrobat 7 out in about a 20-month timeframe, which was a pretty quick turnaround compared to Acrobat 6.”

Foss: In terms of interacting directly with customers, is that done exclusively by product managers or do others on the Acrobat team — such as the engineers — have similar opportunities for user contact?

Brown: “Another thing we've been spending a lot of time on - it's also been part of the culture at Macromedia - is the front-end, customerinformation- gathering process. It's not just product management, it's really sort of representation of everyone on the product team - development, engineering, product management, documentation, user interface and so on - so we can have a very holistic approach. Everyone who touches the product has someone who's been deeply involved with customers, who understands their requirements and can reflect that back through the various people they help to interact with. As we're out there trying to better understand a certain market segment or customer use case, we'll usually put together a crossfunctional team, show some conceptual ideas to customers and get their feedback.

We've also seen our engineering community have a more outward focus in terms of their industry involvement. If you look at things like the PDF standards workgroups, all had product management, marketing and engineering representation. Since they tend to involve a very broad cross-section of people in a particular industry, it's been a great way for us to hear the voice of the customer across many different functions inside a company.”

Foss: Explain how a new feature set such as the collaboration-and review tools gets added, and how different types of customers are using it.

Brown: “Collaboration and review is such an interesting area — a very horizontal application of the technology — that resulted from a collaboration of people who have horizontal responsibility for a feature set. But there are very specific applications of that. For example, legal, AEC and manufacturing all have collaboration-and-review processes, but they're all a little bit different.

In legal, it's much more about textual documents. That collaboration process can include not only the traditional text-based markup, but also a lot of content reuse — saving documents as other formats or just copying and pasting text.

In engineering, you're typically looking at text-based documents, such as specifications, change orders and so on, that are often in context of some sort of design information — a 2D drawing or a 3D model. To really understand how to do review and markup in the context of a 2D or 3D model has been really interesting and has an entirely different set of requirements. We had many different types of customers providing input on their different ways of doing collaboration.

If you just think about legal, AEC and manufacturing, people in those functions are very concerned about sharing content in native form. That's particularly related to the fact that during a collaborative process, if I share info with you in native form, that information is vulnerable to change. If I send you a native Word file or a native CAD document, you may advertently or inadvertently change it. Now I have the problem — the document is so long and there's so much information, the drawings are very complex, there's a lot of information — it's very hard to know if something's changed.

PDF and the things we're doing with 3D allow you to interchange that information in a state I'm comfortable with knowing that if something changes, I can tell what happened — because the way to change it is to use the markup tools. And you also have rollback and comparison capabilities, so inherently PDF is just so much more of a stable format to share across all the people with whom you have to interact.

Again, if you're working with text-based documents, you need one set of tools; but if you're working with drawings and 3D models, you need another set. Sometimes those tools are very specific to engineering markup, more commonly called redlining, which uses an entirely different set of markup types - like clouds and callouts - that someone in a legal or marketing profession would never use. And then, once you've had lots of markup, how do you manage and integrate that markup on the back? We've had to develop a whole set of tools around that.”

Foss: Are you sensing a greater use of PDF not only as an electronic document standard, but also as a container for other associated file types?

Brown: “That's been kind of an emerging area for us. One of the benefits of PDF is that I can take multiple, disparate document types — a 2D drawing that's very large format, a standard text-based document and a 3D model — and concatenate them into a single PDF. No other technology really lets you take all those different information types and package them together into one thing.

In addition, I can now also attach arbitrary data types into that collection as well. So now in a single PDF I can with a great deal of confidence distribute all different kinds of information. As we talk to customers, that's something that's bubbling up as very powerful that they want to take more advantage of.”

Foss: Acrobat and PDF have changed the way many companies and their employees work, in both big and small ways. Describe one way Adobe staff members do their jobs differently today.

Brown: “Acrobat and PDF are pervasive at Adobe — we have many business systems that completely rely on PDF. We have people in the company devoted to the documentation job function, but clearly they need the subject-matter expertise of the engineering and product management groups to review that. We have a PDF-based online review system for all internal documentation. It's converted to PDF, placed on an internal Web server and then people use the markup tools in Acrobat. It goes through a series of iterative review sessions. That's really helpful because we have development people in Canada, India, Seattle and San Jose, and other places throughout the United States. You can post a document in PDF and get feedback from anybody, who can do it in their respective timezones and then the documentation team can incorporate all feedback until it's done.

The other area we use it extensively is in our legal department. We have an internal contract-management system (CMS). All legal documents are converted to PDF and managed through the CMS. All of our internal forms-based processes — expense reports, purchase orders and so on — use PDF and the LiveCycle forms technology. We also use it in ad hoc, personal productivity kinds of ways — if we're creating information in a document, we share it with each other as a PDF.”

Foss: Does the release early this year of Acrobat 3D, the first version aimed at a specific vertical market, suggest we may see other market-specific releases in the future?

Brown: “I can't make any kind of product announcement, but you should definitely expect us to increase our interest in the application of 3D technology as well as in manufacturing. With 3D, we're focused on 3D publishing, which is the ability to take a 3D CAD model and more effectively distribute it to anyone in a very common, ubiquitous format. That's a very horizontal application of 3D, but I think there are some more very specific applications of 3D that are more germane to either the design or manufacturing functions that we're looking at. As well as all the specific market segments we focus on, we're constantly investing in digital signatures, security, and the collaborative reviewand- approval process for all areas. There's a lot to do there and a lot of opportunity to make those processes faster, easier and more effective.

Whether it's a product or just a feature, you will see a horizontal set of features that essentially could be used by almost anyone, combined with some other capabilities that have a more vertical application. From a product perspective, you should expect for us to continue down that path. As we invest in new feature areas, those features may be added to existing products, such as Acrobat Standard, or may be part of a new product, such as Acrobat 3D.”

Foss: A topic of frequent industry discussion in recent years is whether Microsoft poses a serious threat to Acrobat and PDF. The more recent announcement that the Office 12 suite will provide PDF-creation capabilities has rekindled the speculation. What's your take on the competitive situation?

Brown: “We always take competitive possibilities with Microsoft very seriously. That being said, the fact that Office 12 will support PDF creation at the same time represents a tremendous opportunity. It should send a very strong message to customers and our developer partners that PDF is the electronic document standard. If there was any doubt, that should be very clear at this point. If you look at where we're heading with the product, it's all about ‘Now that I have this ubiquitous electronic document standard called PDF, how can I apply it in the context of a business use case?’ It's all about how we can add value on top of that — collaboration, forms and publishing that transcends the basic 2D, static document. In a world where there will be only more and more PDFs, there's lots of opportunity for both Adobe and other people to add value on top of that.

It remains to be seen how quickly the market will migrate to Office 12, so people will still need PDF creation. But where we're really focused is providing more kinds of solutions, either out-of-the-box, desktop-type solutions or a series of integrated products — back-end enterprise systems, more basic workgroup and workflow systems. Now that you have these documents in electronic format, how do you manage them, how do you get more value out of them, how do you collaborate on them and how do you re-use them? That's where all the opportunity is right now.“