Interview with Susan Morrow
Susan Morrow is Macromedia's Senior Director of Product Management, best known amongst Dreamweaver users as the person with the vision and leader of the development team for the DW4 to Dreamweaver MX upgrade.
We caught up with her during the very busy launch week for the MX 2004 family of products for an exclusive interview with DMXzone.com.
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Susan Morrow is Macromedia's Senior Director of Product Management, best known amongst Dreamweaver users as the person with the vision and leader of the development team for the DW4 to Dreamweaver MX upgrade. We caught up with her during the very busy launch week for the MX 2004 family of products for an exclusive interview with DMXzone.com. |
Can you describe what your job entails, what your responsibilities are?
I'm responsible for the businesses for Dreamweaver, Fireworks, HomeSite and Studio, managing a team of product managers and product marketing managers. I partner with the head of engineering for these products, Sho Kuwamoto, to help drive the growth and direction of the business.
Do you only do Dreamweaver or do you have dealings with other groups - e.g., ColdFusion, Flash?
Well, I have responsibility for Studio, which includes Dreamweaver, Flash and a developer edition of the ColdFusion server, so I work with folks on those teams regarding the workflow between the products and the customer requirements for people who use Studio.
How does the process work? Do you decide the new features and then tell engineering to make it, or do they say "look at this" and you say yes or no?
One of the greatest parts of my job is that my team and I work with extremely talented and knowledgeable development and QA engineers. We all work together to define and build each product. My team approaches Dreamweaver from a business/market standpoint, and the dev team from a technology/innovation standpoint, but we are all are very customer focused. The real question in any debate we have over features is whether or not the solution is what serves our customers best - and after sharing data and opinions, we almost always agree on the feature set.
What's been the trickiest feature of Dreamweaver to sell to the community / engineers?
If there's ever a feature of Dreamweaver that's too tricky to sell to the community, then we must have it wrong. If people really need it, we shouldn't have to work hard to explain it! As for selling something to our engineering team - well, it's a matter of tradeoffs.
We'd like to build every cool idea we have into the product, but we'll never actually finish if we try to do them all, so we have to choose the most important. So there have been times that I've worked hard to justify certain features against others. Two examples that come to mind are accessibility and PHP. Everyone thought it would be good to add support for these, but no one was sure how to weigh them against everything else we wanted to do. The fun part for me was researching the business case for why each one of those areas might "pay off" more than other development we were considering.
How did you get into this job? Are you a techie?
I've always thought technology was cool - in fact one of my jobs in high school was working at a computer store assembling and repairing PCs. But I've really loved technology best when it's in service to a larger goal - communicating something, bringing people together, and enabling social change. Most of my professional life has actually been focused on activism, and, like a lot of people, the web first caught my attention as a means of transforming the way people reach each other. I became involved in web development in 1996 when I focused on it as part of a pilot project to address issues of young people with HIV - essentially, our idea was that by helping young people to find each other via the web, they'd feel more empowered in a community and be more likely to take control of their health. It was an elemental idea of how to use technology; it was pretty successful; and I think the principles at work there are as true today as they were then.
What's it like being a woman in what's traditionally been a man's world?
I'm very fortunate to work with a group of great people that care more about my mind than my gender, but I know it's still not like that for many women in technology. I have a very strong interest in seeing a technology workforce that more closely mirrors the world we live in - and there's quite a ways to go, as you'll see any time you look around most technology companies. It's not just gender that poses a barrier - there are a lot of people disenfranchised from information technology, and their inability to participate does and will continue to limit the breadth and meaningfulness of the technology innovations many of us would like to see realized.
Bob Regan told me (in his DMXzone interview last week) that you wrote an accessibility manifesto and circulated it round Macromedia. Why? Why's it a passion?
To me, the issues of accessibility are fundamental to the point of the web. If you're going to go to all the trouble of building a site, wouldn't you make sure it can be seen properly and used by everyone? The answer I heard from developers was that they would like to ensure accessible sites and content, but it was a difficult and confusing task. Championing accessibility at Macromedia was a rare opportunity for me - it was the right thing to do, it was what our customers were asking for, and it would actually make us money. Usually, two out of the three of those is good enough! So a couple of years ago I led an effort to document the current state and needs for accessibility in our authoring products, and I drafted the first company policy on accessibility. And since then, I've continued to support our commitment to accessibility through numerous product development efforts.
Bruce Lawson
I'm the brand manager of glasshaus, a publishing company specialising in books for web professionals. We've a series for dreamweaver professionals - the dreamweaver pro series.
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