Kasha Stewart is the Director of Growth Engagement at Adobe Express.
Victoria talks to Kasha about finding advocates that encourage her to chase problems, getting more women into product development and why it's essential to bring different perspectives into this area, and ways to bring connection between the end users and customers, engineering teams, and the rest of the organization to the business.
Adobe Express (https://www.adobe.com/express/)
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Transcript:
VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido and with us today is Kasha Stewart, Director of Growth Engagement at Adobe Express. Kasha, thank you for joining us.
KASHA: Well, thank you for having me.
VICTORIA: Well, I thought I'd start off by asking you to tell me a little bit more about your background and how you found your way to product from starting out in film and video production.
KASHA: I originally started...I have a fine arts background and did a lot of digital story narrative, post-production. Back in the day (I'm going to date myself.), you had to do...it was a very manual process of chroma keying and removing backgrounds, or refining someone's skin, or some type of background. That was where I kind of...it was my bread and butter. I really loved it. It was creative.
Then in 2008, 2009, the housing market crashed, and the recession happened. And I thought, you know, I'm not a homeowner. What does it have to do with me? I'm taking these freelance jobs. I had just finished my grad program. And then all the jobs kind of disappeared. And I was thinking; here I was; I had gone to grad school. I had a really specific skill set. And then everything just poofed overnight, disappeared. And I thought, okay, well, what's more stable? Like, what could I do to secure a little bit more stability in my job, career?
So I started applying for jobs in all these very different tech, like, they wanted people to be what we used to call a preditor, like, a producer and editor, someone that knew how to do this but also knew how to like FTP massive asset files and also knew how to flag something for when things were going wrong. And so I thought, okay, well, let me just apply for one of these. I have some of the skills. I tick the box on some of the requirements.
And there was a job...it was actually on Craigslist. I actually didn't even know if it was a real job or if it was a scam situation, but I applied. It had a very unusual title; I think it was content distribution editor. And I thought, okay, well, this is interesting. And it was for abc.com. And this is about 2010. I applied. They called me. I thought, okay, why is ABC on Craigslist? But never mind, it was a legitimate job.
And I got into what we call content distribution, so understanding content management systems. And I would be the last person that would actually process the content that would then be delivered to Hulu platforms, abc.com, many different affiliates. There were also Verizon mobile deals at this time, where the cell phone carriers had their own television networks that they tried to stand up.
In that process, I started to really learn about licensing, how content is distributed, meta-tagging, and then also the architecture of a CMS. And I just for the life of me couldn't understand why this was built this way. It was a very cumbersome tool. And like clockwork, around 11:00 p.m. at night, it would crash. And if you hadn't saved your metadata on a notepad or in a spreadsheet, you're basically starting ov