Hi all,
Monday the 1st I joined Filepicker.io to work on User Acquisition and Product Management and I am pumped!
Prior to this role, I worked as a Product Manager of Shopping and Merchandising at Nook (the e-reader owned by B&N) in Palo Alto, Product Manager of League of Legends Shop at Riot Games in Santa Monica, and as a Program Manager on System Center at Microsoft In Seattle. Through these roles I acquired a good amount of knowledge in the areas of eCommerce, Merchandising, Personalization, User Experience, and Enterprise IT Solutions (can you spot the one that comes from Microsoft?). I very much enjoyed defining and building product and look forward to incorporating that knowledge and experience as well as extending my knowledge to identify and address any needs which help with driving healthy adoption of the product.
The largest driver of my fresh excitement stems form the fact that the company, the role, and the space are very young and ripe for innovation and definition. We are again in a position where we are experiencing a paradigm shift like the introduction of the OS, web, mobile, social which I call the interoperability paradigm (until someone comes up with a better name) where developers of end user solutions switch from building their own way of doing everything to adopting services that give you a majority of your applications functionality without having to develop it yourself. Examples include logging in with Facebook, Google Analytics, Ad Platforms, and of course Filepicker! Chances are very high that your application does not specialize in uploading and downloading files and hence any time you spend building those features is time you don’t spend building your magic sauce. Or you can not provide these features and force your users to peck around the web for their files and hope they don’t get discouraged enough to stop using your service. You can think of this space as having two dimensions, horizontal interoperability is something like Filepicker where you get extra functionality which you don’t have to build. Vertical interoperability is for example using Mongo DB instead of building your own. Vertical interoperability has been around for a while and is seeing great adoption at this time, and horizontal is just getting of the ground floor.
My personal definition of success in my role is delighted users. This means that your users are happier with your service because of our service to you. If that is the case I go home happy, if that is not the case, I don’t go home. Here are some principles by which I tend to do my work:
1. Having a small user base that loves you is better than a large users base that thinks you are mehhh, ok…
2. Our product is our best salesperson.
3. An authentic representation is important. You as the community should be informed about all the good and bad of our product or service and kept up to date on improvement and issues in the service.
With these principles in my pocket I hope to provide the best developer experience for our developer community and user experience for their customers. I am sure I will communicate much with many of you and I look forward to that.
I am one of those people that does a little bit of everything when it comes to hobbies, and it changes frequently. Currently I go bike, hike, read, sip lattes, and watch Battle Star Galactica (almost done!).
I hope to meet many of you in the future,
Darko
Filestack is a dynamic team dedicated to revolutionizing file uploads and management for web and mobile applications. Our user-friendly API seamlessly integrates with major cloud services, offering developers a reliable and efficient file handling experience.
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