How these Black Employee Network members are innovating at Adobe

At Adobe, we believe that when people feel respected and included, they can be more creative, innovative, and successful. For Black History Month, we talked with four employees on how Adobe fosters innovation and how diversity plays a part in it.

From designer to data science engineer and program manager to solution architect, we know that innovation can be found across the company.

Here’s what we learned.

Bernard Hishamunda, Data Science Engineer

What are some of the best things Adobe does to help foster innovation?

There are several avenues where Adobe encourages innovation. The most prominent is through collaboration. For example, within my first week at adobe, I was already talking to the Adobe Research, Program managers, and other Product Engineering teams outside of my own.

And in December, everyone (engineers, researchers, product managers, program managers, TechOps, designers, and more) is encouraged to participate in “Garage Week” where we get to work on projects we did not have time to pursue during the year. Garage Week is not only a time to work on interesting projects, but to also learn, and socialize with people across different teams (Photoshop, Acrobat, etc.). Garage Week is basically a company-wide hackathon, and it’s a really impactful one—we have had a few products come out of the Garage Week.

Outside of that, Adobe provides funding for professional education through the Adobe Learning Fund, as well as free access to LinkedIn Learning, O’Reilly, and more. There’s a lot of opportunities to learn here.

What are you working on now? What kinds of innovations are you and your team working toward this year?

I’m part of the Adobe Marketo Engage team and I build machine learning (ML) capabilities with a focus on marketing automation in the B2B space. Applying ML to B2B businesses is challenging because they don’t always have enough data to understand their customer base compared to B2C businesses. These challenges are what makes this problem of ML at the enterprise level interesting, and the reason I do what I do.

We have a lot of cool machine learning capabilities coming out to the B2B space. I am not allowed to disclose the specifics of the projects I am involved with, so the most I can say is...Stay tuned! Keep an eye out on Adobe Summit as well.

Diversity is critical for creativity and innovation. Do you have any thoughts about the role of diversity in innovation at Adobe?

Adobe is doing a lot of good things to spur innovation, such as bringing in more diverse voices and getting our employee resource groups involved. Through the Black Employee Network, I get to learn about what people are doing, and get involved in recruitment efforts, like participating in AfroTech. There is still a lot of work to do, the top of mind being increasing representation in management and executive level roles.

Deanna Washington, Technical Program Manager

What are some of the best things Adobe does to help foster innovation?

Adobe fosters innovation by creating space for us all to challenge the status quo. We always ask ourselves, “How can we think bigger?”

Some of the greatest ideas and initiatives come from collaboration and sharing different perspectives. At Adobe, I’ve always felt encouraged to connect with employees outside of my team to learn about their point of view. One of the best parts of my current role is that I can bridge the gap between various teams, which ultimately helps us all get closer to innovation together.

What are you working on now? What kinds of innovations are you and your team working toward this year?

Currently, I work as a Technical Program Manager and my responsibility is to take ideas and enable my team to execute and make it happen. I’m on the awesome Spectrum team, which is responsible for Adobe’s design system. This year the Spectrum team has a ton of priorities and cool initiatives that support building the future user interfaces (UI) of Adobe’s products. We plan on elevating Spectrum by updating our style, building new and exciting libraries, promoting product consistency, and scaling to allow teams to take full advantage of what our design system has to offer.

As a result of these initiatives, people at Adobe will have more opportunities to design and build product experiences that feel familiar and delightful for everyone.

Diversity is critical for creativity and innovation. Do you have any thoughts about the role of diversity in innovation at Adobe?

Diversity absolutely fuels innovation. Hiring and supporting diverse employees to foster creativity is the first step. The second step, which is engrained in Adobe’s culture, is to include them in influential discussions and promote a comfortable environment where differences in opinions are celebrated. It’s so exciting to see our company take steps towards having the employees who build our products reflect the diversity of the creatives we support.

Sade Bamidele, Senior Multi Solution Architect

What are some of the best things Adobe does to help foster innovation?

Adobe actively promotes a culture of innovation. We have opportunities to submit ideas and work on innovative and impactful solutions for our customers and for our internal processes that define the way we deliver. One of my favourite things Adobe has done to help foster innovation is hosting hackathons. In a matter of days, a solution to a challenge is designed, implemented and documented. Not only does it create innovative solutions, but it also fosters team building.

What are you working on now? What kinds of innovations are you and your team working toward this year?

I work on digital transformation projects with our customers, focusing on how their business goals, objectives and strategy can be delivered with our technology solutions. It’s an area that has innovation all around, especially as we help our customers create personalized experiences to deliver the right message, at the right time, on the right channel.

I’m currently working on the first phase of a project in the travel and hospitality industry, where the customer is leveraging real time data to power email marketing messages. Over time this will expand to SMS, web and more touchpoints. This will also expand so that richer real time datasets and possibly artificial intelligence powered datasets are utilized with a goal to increase digital dialogue with customers and be more customer centric.

Diversity is critical for creativity and innovation. Do you have any thoughts about the role of diversity in innovation at Adobe?

Diversity comes in many forms. I think diversity is important for creativity because we all have unique experiences, perspectives and ways of thinking, and this can be influenced by our environment. If we come together, the combined output will be great because you have a wider variety of ideas to come to an innovative solution, and there are lots of opportunities to innovate at Adobe.

Torin Edwards, User Experience Designer

What are some of the best things Adobe does to help foster innovation?

Every time I’ve asked someone what their favorite part of working here is, they’ve told me it’s the people—I think that’s where innovation really starts. Everyone is here because we want to make technology that is not just cool, but also accessible to everyone and I think that mindset goes a long way towards fostering an innovative environment. On top of that, our weeklong “Garage Week” provides dedicated time to workshop exciting new ideas which really made me feel empowered to think big.

What are you working on now? What kinds of innovations are you and your team working toward this year?

I’m currently dreaming big with a cross-functional team of designers, engineers and product managers to imagine the future vision for Adobe Experience Cloud. Together, we’re going to build the next generation of marketing tools to help companies target the right audiences for their campaigns in a simpler, smarter and more effective way.

Diversity is critical for creativity and innovation. Do you have any thoughts about the role of diversity in innovation at Adobe?

I come from a design thinking background and one of the core tenants of the ideology is that in order to create something truly impactful you need to look at it from different perspectives—that’s why having team members with different cultures, ethnicities and life experiences is so critical. I firmly believe that having more diverse technologists will make Adobe even more innovative. This is a topic that I’ve always been passionate about, and I look forward to supporting the effort to show folks who look like me that there’s a place in tech for them.