Amitabh Misra, Adobe India’s VP of Digital Experience on his 2022 vision

For Amitabh Misra, his penchant for technology wasn’t the only reason he decided to join Adobe. As the former CTO, chief architect, and head of engineering at Snapdeal, what drew Amitabh to join Adobe as the vice president of Experience Cloud engineering was the opportunity to lead a global R&D organisation of 800+ product engineers across India, Europe and the US. In our interview with him, learn more about the innovation that Amitabh is driving, and how culture and values play a large part in bringing it all together.

How do you encourage creativity and innovation in your teams?

Adobe is a global digital experience leader, and that presents us and our teams with a myriad of opportunities to work on our passion for technology. With a significant presence in our India R&D centres for each of Adobe’s digital experience products, our teams in India have the unique ability to interact with customers globally, understand their problems first-hand and provide customised solutions. These boundless avenues foster a direct connection between our R&D team members and customers, opening the doors for innovation and creative thinking.

I encourage my team to explore new avenues like ‘the creation of value for our customers.’ The objective is to encourage them to think about innovative, out-of-the-box solutions, based on their interactions with the customers. At Adobe, we strongly believe that ideas can and do come from anywhere, and everywhere. We have introduced regular Garage Weeks—for my team to spend time focussing on new ideas and presenting the best ones to the leadership group. Take, for instance, the fact that our computer scientists often come up with great ideas for innovation, build a prototype, showcase it, before taking it forward in the product roadmap.

In 2021, nearly 100 new and innovative ideas were presented to us across Garage Weeks and Hackathons. We also have a powerful Media and Data Science Research Lab, where cutting-edge research in all major product areas in digital experience takes place. The MDSR team members have co-authored over 120 publications in top conferences and journals and the team collectively has filed over 150 patents. This is where we bring in younger minds (like interns), and encourage them to share their ideas, giving them the opportunity to learn and grow. From among these, we select the top ideas and take them forward into production.

What aspects of technology excellence does Adobe operate out of India for global product development?

Our big vision statement for digital experiences is driving omnichannel personalization at scale. We have a vibrant suite of products, and we enrich our customers through value creation across product lines. Adobe is a global leader (by miles!) in bringing all these digital experiences together in a platform that is a single source of data. On this platform, we have cloud-native and platform-native services catering to the different needs of our customers.

A few of the newer applications that we have just brought in have given us tremendous traction in the market—Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO), Real-Time Customer Data Platform (RTCDP), and Customer Journey Analytics to name a few. For us, this marks the beginning of a new era where instead of just having disparate solutions stitched together to a single platform where all the data comes in, we create a unified digital experience. We are not only bringing the data together and creating interesting experiences from one single source but also building intelligent solutions. This is Adobe’s unique value proposition. I don’t think we have any competitors in this space.

In the context of modern and futuristic technology, currently, we are building on top of the journey optimizer, which handles multiple channels like email, SMS, and push. We have now built and enabled a modernized experience of outbound channels from the platform on these three channels that I talked about and bringing it together with the inbound channel of the web. And it's also a centralized platform in one sense and on edge because Web experiences get delivered from the edge. So that is the new big thing that our India teams are working on.

How do you define your team's culture?

Adobe India is not just any other multinational company, and here’s why — many multinationals in India do core engineering work in their primary markets and only send back-office projects to India. On the Adobe India Digital Experience team, we do core engineering and research work out of the India office. Not everyone knows that thirty percent of Adobe's R&D and significant product transformations are being scripted here.

From my personal experience, I have never seen a workplace where the organization empathizes with people and lets them create a career path for life. As employees, we are very closely knit, more so, for those who've been around for a long time. For those who are new to the team or Adobe in general, our culture allows them the appropriate time and space to express their individuality while absorbing the best aspects of our company’s diversity of thought. We encourage people to do bigger and better things, always. These values are seeded in all business units of Adobe. It is this cultural fabric that makes us unique.

We understand that the culture of diversity and inclusion impacts the hiring landscape. How has this journey been for your team?

We enormously value diversity and promote our value system similarly across the globe. Within the digital experience group, I have one of my direct staff members lead this charter by dedicating his time to further Adobe's Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) mission. We have a very scientific approach towards analysing what problems or challenges people from diverse groups face and how we can level-up the hiring process to be more inclusive of them.

We also have D&I champions within each team. We seek every opportunity we can to hire across the diversity spectrum. For instance, last year we partnered with the talent acquisition team to build a pipeline of women leaders for leadership roles that didn't exist at the time. We wanted to create opportunities relevant to this group’s skill and talent, so we have a ready pipeline of leaders when the working relationship or organizational structure is established to absorb them. This holds true for our senior women leaders' group and our college graduates, as we scout for diverse talent across experience levels.