Product Manager for Developer Relations for the Flash Platform

I wanted to let everyone know that I am working in a new role at Macromedia now. My new title is “Product Manager for Developer Relations for the Flash Platform” (is that title long enough for you?). Basically, I am in charge of developer relations for Flash Authoring, Central and the Flash Player.

This is a new position and has two primary goals:

1. Ensure that designer and developer concerns are heard, represented and fought for to the internal product teams.
2. Communicate the team’s goals, tasks, thoughts, ideas and plans to users.

This position, as well as the new Technical Product manager position on the Flash team (congrats to Mike Downey), are new positions created to institutionalize communication and contact with users. We want to ensure that we don’t loose touch with our users, and that future releases of our tools and platforms are of the quality that you expect of Macromedia (something we didn’t really deliver on with our current release of Flash Authoring).

These are just a few of the many changes that have occurred around how we build Flash. There are a ton of other new things, which we will be posting about in the coming weeks.

You will see the first fruits of these changes with the upcoming Ellipsis update. As Kevin Lynch discussed at the FlashForward SF and FlashInTheCan keynotes, Ellipsis is a significant update to Flash MX 2004 (due out later this summer). It won’t fix every problem / annoyance in Flash, but it is the first step in re-making Flash as a super solid, resource friendly tool for creating great experiences. What you will find in Ellipsis are tons of bug fixes, significant resource and performance improvements, and a huge update to the documentation. Expect a lot more information on this update in the coming days and weeks.

I will also be doing a lot more traveling and speaking, talking to designers and developers, and communicating how we see the Flash platform and ecosystem evolving. I actually did a short user group tour in Northern Europe a couple of weeks ago, talking about our vision for the Flash platform and ecosystem. I will be doing more tours later this year.

Over the next couple of days and weeks, we will be posting more information on Ellipsis, our vision for Flash, and additional steps we are taking to ensure that we build the tool that designers and developers want.

Questions? Thoughts? Suggestions? Post them in the comments, or email me directly at mesh@macromedia.com.