Week 14: Outside of Class (Off-Campus Event)

On Tuesday I went to an off campus event in Harrisburg that was hosted by the Central Pennsylvania Adobe Users group. Originally, there was supposed to be a speaker there who would be presenting on Adobe XD, an upcoming prototyping software. However, when I arrived, the people hosting the event notified us that the speaker was no longer unable to come, but that the host, Megan, would speak instead. She told us about how Adobe XD's biggest competitor right now is Invision. I thought this was interesting, given that we had just used that program in our previous project. She mentioned that in order to truly compete, they would have to make sure that they included everything Invision had, and more, otherwise she felt it likely wouldn't take off in the same way. After she spoke briefly on Adobe XD, she then went on to talk about her personal experience working as a project manager for a company called gun.io. Since I didn't really know a lot about the project management aspect of design and development, I found her speech to be interesting. She talked about the difference between a project manager and a product manager, something I didn't even know existed. The difference was that a project manager focuses on the logistics of the project, and a product manager is expected to be the expert on the project. When asked about some of the most difficult or unexpectedly problematic parts of her job, she talked about working internationally. This is difficult, obviously, due to time zone differences, but she also talked about the positives of working with people across the globe. The biggest one was the ability to essentially keep working 24 hours a day, as they would pass the project from one to another and the day went on. This causes an increase in productivity, as opposed to a localized business, which is confined to one time zone and therefore fewer hours. Another interesting aspect about her job and the company that she worked for is that they have a huge pool of people from all sorts of different design/development backgrounds. Because of this, she is able to pull different people who specialize in a variety of things and delegate them to a specific project. A lot of these people are actually temp employees who can pick up odd jobs here and there, similar to freelance. Finally, one of the other most interesting things she spoke on was the relationship between a developer and a customer, in that, they shouldn't have one. She said that this can cause a variety of issues in terms of a he said/she said situation. It is for this reason that project and product managers exist, to avoid conflicts that can arise when the developer and the customer talk in private. I had never really given any thought to difficulties between a developer and customer in any other sense than miscommunication and misunderstandings. Although the event ended up being not exactly what I came for, I still found it to be interesting and useful as a different perspective into what could potentially be my future.