Chloe McConnell and working together with Adobe Spark

When Chloe McConnell thinks about what ultimately drove her to Adobe, it’s because of the experience she had working at The New Yorker, where all of her job was done in products like InDesign and Photoshop, “I saw the power that these products had,” she said.

When the partnership between The New Yorker and Adobe continued to grow, her team became one the earliest clients of Adobe’s digital publishing suite. She saw how Adobe was adapting to meet the needs of the future, and that stuck with her. Later, when McConnell pursued her MBA with a focus on product management, Adobe became the goal. She knew the company as a customer and was passionate about making the tools better.

“I went through the traditional recruiting process, and found a role as a product marketing manager for Adobe XD through the MBA internship program. It provided a perfect flavor of the company and was a great opportunity. During my internship I networked with other teams and I landed a full-time role on the Adobe Spark team.”

Now, as a principal product manager for Adobe Spark, McConnell is driving a project all around collaborative team workflows, which touches uses cases in education, digital marketing and social media. With collaborative features in Spark, users can create and tell stories together with social graphics, web pages and videos.

When asked what her favorite part of the job is, she was quick to answer, “Speaking to users and getting to know their day-to-day is the best part of my job. Their feedback drives new feature implementations, and helping solve their key problems is what I’m passionate about. Something that’s really unique to Spark is that we’re from the same company that created Photoshop and other flagship design products. That history adds such a level of opportunity.”

Helping our users during COVID-19

As someone who’s working on improving collaboration in Spark, when the pandemic hit, McConnell and her team were quick to identify where they could help. And for them it really boiled down to two areas.

“First, we recognized that there was an increase in remote learning and working. There is a strong need to improve and invest in collaboration workflows here. The second focus was helping small business rethink how to reach their audiences. These small businesses need to learn and reach new users and create compelling and eye-catching stories. For us to respond to this, we’re talking to a lot of these users to really understand what their challenges are. Some of the new programs we’ve rolled out include offering free premium Spark access for an extended period of time, retailoring our blog content to focus on teaching users what they want to learn, and hosting weekly live sessions to help share tips. And now that we have a lot of feedback, we’re looking at what new collaborative features we can introduce.”

There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done, but as someone who’s passion it is to solve key problems for her customers, McConnell is up for the challenge. “The reason why people here at Adobe stay so long and why we’re all so driven to help our customers is simple. It’s because Adobe invests in their employees. When that happens, we learn to bring the same amount of support for our users. We’re all in this together!”