Branding & Organizational Process Improvement
As a member of the Developer Relations team, I worked on fostering development of and contributions to open source projects at Adobe. Two specific projects I worked on to achieve this goal: developing a recognized brand for the internal Open Source Summit series and improving the open source approval workflow.
Adobe Open Source Summit Series
The Adobe Open Source Summit, an internal conference, was established by my team to educate people new to open source software development and to provide an event encouraging connections with those already working in the open source space. Held at Adobe offices in Switzerland, the United States, and India the event series brought attention to the importance of open source work for Adobe at large.
01 Graphic Design
Using our initial location, Switzerland, as inspiration for the visual style of materials for the event, I created a number of options for a print poster to be displayed in offices. The goal was to provide details on the conference and to encourage registration for the event. The posters were displayed in offices worldwide. I worked with the marketing manager on my team to write the copy for the poster and create the registration page (not shown).
02 Gather Feedback & Expand Assets
I polled members of my team, stakeholders, and internal community members to give feedback and vote on their favourite design, and used the resulting (most popular) approach to design additional assets including: attendee badges, t-shirts, stand-up banners, digital signage and awards. These assets were vetted with Adobe's Brand team for approval before moving to production.
03 Production
I worked with multiple third party print production teams to ensure files and proofs were correct for each asset, and as always was excited to see my work in the third dimension.
Adobe Open Source Office, Approval Submission Process
The Adobe Open Source Office, comprised by a sub-set of the Developer Relations team, was interested in improving the process for employees looking to contribute to and create open source projects. Before the process was improved, it was incredibly difficult and time-consuming for people to understand how to get approval on the work that they were trying to do in their day-to-day jobs. The Open Source Office asked me to help improve the workflow.
01 User & Stakeholder Interviews
With the help of two members of the Open Source Office team, I talked with known open source contributors at Adobe to understand what was working for them, and where the key points of failure were happening. I found that not only was requesting approval difficult (and enough of a hurdle that people wouldn't bother to try), responses to the requests went unanswered for months. Effectively the whole process had been buried on an outdated wiki page with no clear action or contact information.
We then engaged with the legal team at Adobe to understand constraints, but also to educate them on the open source software space. As an interesting aside, two members of the legal team that we worked with spoke at the Open Source Summit to talk through what they had learned and how they could help foster a community for product teams working in open source.
02 Form Design
I narrowed down the absolutely necessary information that needed to be captured from users, and the two developers on my team wired up a form containing these elements. Then, I reviewed the prototype and provided feedback on required improvements.
Ultimately, we built a form (based on Adobe's design system, Spectrum) that integrates with Adobe's corporate GitHub, which enhances track-ability of submissions for both people submitting requests and for people approving the submissions.
03 Tracking Impact
We informed internal developers on the updated workflow (using email, newsletter articles, and Slack), and encouraged people to provide feedback on the new process.
As a result of implementing the form, we've seen approval time reduced from weeks to hours, and the number of developers at Adobe contributing to open source has more than doubled in less than 12 months.