Tom Krcha, a senior product manager at Adobe, will be sitting down with STRV CEO David Semerad on December 7 to discuss the fast-paced San Francisco tech scene and how Adobe’s Project Comet is going to change the way websites and mobile apps are designed and developed.
There are still a few tickets available for the fireside chat at Cinema City Slovansky dum and the after-party at STRV’s offices. Reserve your tickets on Eventbrite today!
To pique your interest, we caught up with Tom earlier this week to ask him a few questions about work and life in Silicon Valley.
In what ways is the San Francisco IT scene different from the Prague tech scene?
I haven’t been living in Prague for four years, so it might be hard to compare. Simply the way I see it is that Silicon Valley and SF is where lot of tech people are right now – designers, engineers, scientists, marketing people and many other professions that play significant roles in the tech industry. This feeds lots of great dialogue and networking opportunities everywhere and anytime. There are countless meetups happening every day, where you can have a casual chat with plenty of talented and passionate folks, many of whom succeeded here. This is very inspirational and motivating. I think the same good networking culture is happening in Prague as well, this is just a different scale with people from all around the world. It often gets compared to Florence during the Renaissance era. However one thing to keep in mind – it is important to travel out of SF on a regular basis and keep the broader perspective.
From your perspective, what does it take to be successful in Silicon Valley?
There are so many variables, moving pieces that change all the time. However, if you have your vision validated and you fully believe in it, then it’s important to stay on target, execute and deliver your product on time with high quality (easier said than done). I think this skill of execution and delivery is what makes the difference. In order to achieve that, I believe it’s most important to have a great team, with clear goals and clearly defined roles and accountabilities, but also a team where everyone is happy to help each other to resolve or discuss any task and get up to speed on any related topic. Pair dreamers with doers, minimize distractions and focus on one thing.
How do you think Project Comet will change the IT field?
Project Comet is laser focused on product design of user interfaces and user experiences, from designing and prototyping to sharing and export for production. It really is a communication tool for designers to convey your idea to other people (developers, other designers, executives, investors and of course users). You can do high–fidelity design as well as tell the story of your app or a website by connecting the screens in the flow and building an interactive prototype.
By combining these two major pieces together we believe we will save roundtrip time for designers to go between these workflows and help them more efficiently communicate their designs and ideas. We also looked at areas of design that take most of the time or become repetitive with a goal to minimize the number of steps – for instance operations that took three or four steps can now be done in a single step.
Our goal is to make Project Comet approachable by anyone – keep the tool easy to use so it can be quickly picked up by an aspiring designer but still make it powerful so it serves the pros. Finding a right balance is a challenge, but we love doing that, and we believe designers will appreciate it.
