EVP OF PRODUCT TALKS ABOUT HER WORK AT COOLIRIS

Here is another interview from our “Inside Cooliris” series. This week we are featuring our Executive Vice President of Product – Michele Turner. Read on to find out more about her professional past and well as her vision for the Cooliris product development.

Where did you work before Cooliris?

I came to Cooliris from Adobe Systems where I ran product marketing, developer relations, product management for the Flash Platform. I originally went to Adobe to work on Adobe Air, which is a really interesting breakthrough in technology. In addition to AIR, we re-launched the Flash Platform, made significant progress bringing on new developers, realigned our Mobile efforts and really built up the evangelism team while I was there. Prior to that I did consulting for several Web 2.0 start-ups, primarily focusing on product development and marketing. I helped launch a couple companies including Kosmix and Wink. I have also worked at some of the big Internet companies, including Excite@Home and AOL. I cut my teeth in product management at a company called Silicon Graphics, which was one of the big computer graphics companies back in the ‘90s.  I was there for 9 years and I covered the gamut from product management to product marketing to developer relations.

How did you get into technology?

I was meeting with a friend who was at Silicon Graphics and he offered me a job as a Product Manager. So my first job in tech was as a product manager for the multiprocessing C compiler.  It was a very technical product and I wouldn’t have probably hired me, but that opened the door for me. I ended up running software product management for SGI for a while and later took over Developer Relations. We had a nice little $50-million-a-year software tools product line, which back in 1996 wasn’t a bad thing at all.

How is it being a woman in the tech world?

In business meetings, I am often the only woman in the room, but I really don’t notice it anymore. Unfortunately that’s the nature of the Valley to some degree, as there are simply fewer women graduating with engineering degrees. I think that the Internet has been a bit of an equalizer – there are a lot more women doing product management, design and web development, in addition to marketing, for consumer internet products. There are also more female CEO’s in the consumer Internet space – Meg Whitman and Carol Bartz who is now at Yahoo! are two who immediately come to mind. There are definitely more women in technical roles than there were ten years ago.  However, I think it’s critical that companies really work for gender and cultural diversity in their hiring.  It’s always important in order to create a balanced team, but when you’re creating products for consumers it’s even more important as it helps you have an internal reality check on how applicable your offerings are to different types of people.

When did you come on board in Cooliris? What’s your role?

I joined Cooliris in July to run Product and Marketing. What I am really focused on right now is trying to figure out the next generation of Cooliris. We have a really great product for viewing photos and videos on the web. It’s very fast and efficient, particularly for finding images that you are looking for, and it’s a fun way of viewing them. What we are working on now is how to make Cooliris a product that people want to use every day.  We are also working on performance improvements to make the current product experience better. So job #1 is shoring up our foundation and making sure that the current product works well across platforms and browsers, and that we start looking beyond our current installed base to more opportunities that we can address today. The second thing we are focused on is to better expose the great functionality at Cooliris that people have a hard time finding.  The third thing we are spending a lot of time on is defining our 2.0 release – creating a product that solves a problem for people, that’s delightful to use and has them coming back every day.

What new can the users expect from Cooliris?

Two big things are coming up – first is performance improvement. We just released Cooliris 1.11.5,which provides significant performance improvements for Windows  users overall and IE users in particular. Our upcoming 1.12 release is going be focused on personalization – particularly around the Cooliris channels and content. We have amazing content from Hulu, CBS and Warner, but it’s hard to find today. We are focusing on helping people realize that we actually have this incredible content in the first place, and make it more discoverable.  Right now we don’t even surface the content in a logical, time-based sequence in the Wall – there is a lot of room for improvement. We will also allow people to start favoriting items and personalizing their Cooliris experience a bit more so that it would be easier for them to find what they want.

What can the users expect for the 2.0 release?

We are moving to a new platform for 2.0 which will open the door to many new product opportunities, including new and more effective ways of viewing content. The Wall works very well for viewing videos and photos, but for viewing text-based content it is not as effective.  We’re still in the product definition phase, doing a number of user studies.  What we want to provide people with is the best way to discover and share the media that they love.

Favorite feature of Cooliris?

There two things I use it for a lot. I like looking at Facebook photos on Cooliris because it’s fun, and gives me a better viewing experience than I get on Facebook. Second, I have 3 kids so I have a lot of family photos. I first became hooked on Cooliris when I was looking for one specific photo of my son and I couldn’t find it because I have 5000 photos on my machine. I was paging through iPhoto and I thought, “Oh, what about using Cooliris to find this”.  It took me less than a minute to find that photo using Cooliris. My husband was looking for the exact same photo on his PC, paging through endless screens of images,  and it took him 45 minutes to find the same photo. So if I’m searching for a photo – one of mine or something on the web, Cooliris is definitely the place I start.

One fun fact about yourself?

I’m a runner, and years ago I ran the Berlin Marathon.  It was the year the Berlin Wall came down, and we were some of the first westerners to run freely through what was then East Germany.  I will never forget the sight of the Germans running through the Brandenburg Tor with tears in their eyes as they crossed into East Berlin.  It was an amazing and touching experience.