Format
Portfolio website builder for creative professionals
I met Lukas Dryja at a design meetup in Toronto where I used to volunteer. He mentioned he was the CEO of Format. I had never heard of Format so I asked what it was. I can't recall what Lukas said; I just remember I couldn't understand his explanation. Nonetheless, I asked him what brought him to the event and what he was hoping to get out of it. Lukas mentioned he was looking to network and hoping to find front-end developers since they were hiring. I said sounds good, and that I'll keep an eye out. By the end of the event, I had introduced him to maybe seven developers. He was genuinely surprised and grateful.
About a month went by, and I got a random message from Lukas on LinkedIn. He mentioned he had created a new role with me in mind. Strangely, the role was for a project manager, and not a UX designer. Nonetheless, I was curious and decided to hear him out. This led me to take on yet another new role that I had no formal education or work experience in, but I'm grateful for every bit of it.
Project Manager
Oct 2014–Mar 2016
I was told I would help document and refine the processes across the design, development and marketing teams—essentially figuring out the process from ideation to launch. However, what I didn't know was that the company was going to double in size (from ~24 to ~50+) in less than nine months. This was an overwhelming challenge because I had to quickly familiarize myself with how things were done when I joined, make sure to document it, then work with stakeholders to refine the process, see how the new process is working out, then refine it further, then communicate these changes to the company, get their feedback, refine the process further, and so on and so on. All of this was on top of learning to motivate people with different personalities to adopt and follow the process as they continued to evolve. To help accelerate my learning further, I enrolled in a number of different project management courses on Lynda consuming more than 40 hours of lessons.
Product Manager and Digital Producer
Mar 2016–Dec 2016
Being a project manager, I was involved in every project at the company. This not only exposed me to all the decisions that were made made, but also how those decisions were made. It also helped that I could contribute feedback on product ideas and designs during my role as a project manager.
All of this came in handy when Format launched Format Publisher plugin for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic. Since I was one of the few people at the company who was a photographer and a Lightroom user, I had the opportunity to start testing the app. As I tested the app, I continued to provide more and more feedback. This led to me becoming the directly responsible individual for the Format Publisher plugin. As part of the launch, we had to create marketing communication to drive adoption as well as create documentation to ensure people were able to install it correctly and troubleshoot any issues that came up.
Around the same time, Format started thinking about launching an iOS app, and I offered to help take it on. Funny enough, I became the first product manager at Format. Prior to that, the product decisions were split between Lukas and Tyler Rooney (co-founder).
