Empowering Our Developer Community in 2021
By: Ingo Eichel
Tags: Webinars, Plugins, Adobe Creative Cloud, Developers, Events

2020 has been a year of change with many hurdles and challenges, but also with great lessons. While we still aim to go back to the old normal for parts of our lives we also embrace the new normal in other areas or even try to continue and improve on lessons learned this year. For example, after our Partner Days in June, I wrote “Why Switching Our Event From In-person to Digital was the Best Move in Years”.

In 2020 we held digital events like the first ever virtual Adobe MAX (more than 21 million total video views and 50 million social interactions), our partner and developer reception, user group gatherings, other conferences, webinars, digital workshops and now we’re holding virtual xmas parties! I had many new experiences in 2020. Looking back — and I guess this is true for you as well — I was introduced to new concepts that worked well as well as others that were a waste of time.

Goals and aspirations for 2021

My goal for 2021 is to invite you to join us for many more events, to try out different formats for learning, communication and knowledge exchange and also to show off your work to a broader audience.Why? The main four drivers for this are:

We, the Creative Cloud Platform and Ecosystem team, want to help you build better integrations faster and learn what is missing. For that we want to support you with the latest information and roadmaps for the products and services you need most. We want to discuss long term plans and strategies to get your feedback. Plus, we want to support plugins and integrations that support our new features, like the Creative Cloud Libraries API. We want you to be successful in driving awareness and growing usage of your plugins and integrations (since that makes Creative Cloud more successful as well). We want to grow our ecosystem of developers globally, build a more diverse community and empower underrepresented communities to join easily. (Here’s one way we started to do this in 2020.)

We are all in this together — and we should benefit all from this together.

2021 Event Planning

With the ongoing pandemic we won’t have any in person meetings in the first half of 2021 for sure and expect also to be most or fully virtual for the rest of the year.

In the following paragraphs I describe my plans so far. You can help me build out formats that you value the most and create content that is relevant for your work and business by filling out this survey and joining the discussion in our LinkedIn group.

Two large events for the whole developer ecosystem

We plan for another Partner Days event, probably around June, that covers overall roadmap and strategy as well as business development and go-to-market presentations.

At or after MAX we will celebrate the year with a reception and some sneaks from the community.

Product or service specific meetings

Would you like to meet the product managers and engineers, either of a single product like Illustrator or a service like Creative Cloud Libraries? I’m planning meetings like these for 2021. Distribution or Go-to-market discussions could also fall under this category…

Developer Roundtables

Here’s my concept: One topic. No presentations. Knowledge exchange. Chatting with like-minded developers. Virtual drinks. Sound good?

Virtual Hackathons

When we know a product will add UXP or we add new APIs we might invite developers to virtual dev days for launch partners.

Webinars of your solutions

Together with GoProof I worked on a pilot for a new webinar series: “Plug in — 20 minutes of extensibility”. The series lets you present one of your plugins or integrations in three easy steps: an elevator pitch, a 15 minute demo, and a call to action. We will start building and distributing more episodes in 2021. Please apply with the survey if you want to be part of this.

“Plug in. 20 minutes of extensibility”

Live streams on Behance

Have you discovered the possibility of live streaming on Adobe Behance yet? Check it out here: https://www.behance.net/live/streamers. It’s a great opportunity to inspire creatives around the globe with your solutions. I am in discussion with the Behance team to figure out how we could consolidate live streams that talk about plugins and integrations. Let me hear your ideas and proposals and share links whenever you stream about your integrations.

Internal enablement

Internal enablement is mostly driven by my colleague Aimara Rodriguez. We had many internal enablement sessions for different XD plugins in 2020 and plan to build this out for other products in 2021. Stay tuned.

Community driven events and workshops

While our resources are limited, we want to grow globally as well as among new, more diverse and underrepresented communities we look for people or groups as multipliers who run their own meetups, workshops or hackathons. We are looking for ideas, people, and existing communities that we might be able to fund in 2021.

Are you interested in running (do you already run) your own developer meetups or hackathons for plugins or integrations with Creative Cloud? Are you aware of others who do this or of developer communities we should connect with? Please let us know through the survey!

The Adobe Fund for Design

Please always reach out to us if you have new ideas for the Adobe Fund for Design. As a recap: We fund new and innovative ideas to connect with Creative Cloud, we have some commissioned projects we need developers for and we want to spend half of the money for underrepresented communities going forward.

Feedback for the New Year

We build this out for you — so please let us know your feedback on the ideas above, ask questions and propose changes that will help you and others in our community.

Please fill out our survey

Join the discussion on LinkedIn

You will hear back from me with updates and save-the-dates.

Until then, enjoy time with (core) family and (some) friends, stay safe and healthy, and look back to what turned out positive in 2020.

Looking forward seeing you all back next year!