In My Spare Time
I love to ski, backpack, camp, mountain bike and I’m a photo nut. These days I’m shooting Nikon for client work, and my iPhone loaded with a few photo apps for fun. I use Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop as the ‘darkroom’ duo. At any given time, I post stuff on the blog or to flickr.com or to myfamily.com or to 500px.com or to G+ or of course to my pro site seanmalone.com. Too many places.

I’m also passionate about great products by design. Not great visual design, UI or any other specific design discipline per se, but great whole product design which includes them all. I believe the design discipline is one of the most important and yet underrated, undervalued factors in pretty much any consumer or business businesses that produce a product. And the bar for online services is rising quickly… as companies are realizing the tremendous value of getting it right, and shaping their organizations to fundamentally understand, learn, and adapt. Design, build, test, mix and repeat. Again, and again. Innovators and early adopters will be the first to buy and use it if you get it right. And early adopters happen to talk a lot about what they like and don’t. Important factors in early product success.

Ok, enough about that.

My Professional Background
I’ve been focused on web product & services since 1995 – initially for a design and marketing agency where I started as a designer turned design director, and worked on projects for clients like HP, VSP, Intel and many other smaller companies.

In February of ‘98, I joined a startup as employee #32, one of the first web analytics companies, Andromedia, to lead the corporate web team and later expanded the team’s role to include core product design. Shortly after filing an S1, Andromedia was bought by Macromedia (later acquired by Adobe).

Late in ‘99 I co-founded craft.com, a web service geared for the craft and hobby enthusiast; a $25B market at the time. The site sold craft and hobby supplies along with craft projects that customers could buy in a box ready to assemble. Ultimately users would be able to add their own projects for sale, including instructions, and be able to identify the parts/skus from the site to be included in the kit. Our founder Brad Roberts brought the initial idea and seed round, and we built a great first version product in 4 months, which was remarkably fast back then. But alas, though we had a great launch, it was Q1 of 2000 and the .com bubble was bursting.

In 2000, I joined MetaMarkets.com as Director of UE and Web Development, a startup reinventing the mutual fund model giving real-time trading transparency and trader/investor-community interactions via the web. Cool concept but didn’t work out for a number of reasons, not the least of which, we were now in the thick of the .com bubble burst.

In January 2003, I worked for Ofoto.com, the first online photo sharing and print fulfillment business, that was bought by Kodak (today kodakgallery.com). I first worked on getting the service globalized to 7 countries. Then, joined the product management team and I focused on some key product changes and internal business initiatives. One was the sharing model where we increased sharing 60% at launch, and improved share-visitor conversion to purchase by 37%. I had a ton of fun and met some really fantastic people, but left for an exciting opportunity…

In 2006 I moved my family to Seattle where I was head of product for an all new version of myfamily.com, a subscription-based business unit of Ancestry.com focused on a service for families or any group to (usually privately) socialize, share photos, videos, files, events, discussions, etc., etc. I was director of product management for 2 years, then lead the business unit as GM for 2 years, and got the business to profitability the first year. In November of 2009, the company went public primarily on the revenue and growth of the family history subscription model of Ancestry.com, and in 2010 I moved back to San Francisco to work on the product.

For more specifics, visit my LinkedIn profile: linkedin.com/in/seanmalone


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