Michael Sean Heflin | Creative Technologist

Profile

I help start-ups and established brands create meaningful, innovative digital experiences.

Michael Sean Heflin
Product Manager

I am a product manager with 10+ years of experience helping small businesses and startups deliver meaningful, innovative digital experiences. My work focuses on shaping clients’ brand positioning, communication strategy, user experience, social planning and content approaches. I believe that good brands can make happy people, and happy people make a better brand.

Born in California’s Southern Valley to a family of speedway-racing, mad-inventing, ‘80s computer hackers, I grew up building, creating, racing and blowing things up. From eccentric science fair competitions to garage band performances I have spent my life creating, questioning and testing the boundaries of what’s possible. With my love of art and computers, digital experiences became the lovechild of everything I gravitated toward.

Partial client list: Stanford University, MoMA Store, NBC Universal , Procter & Gamble, Bertelsmann's BOL.com, the Dutch Telephone Company and Bluefly.com

Technical Skills

HTML 4.01, HTML5, XHTML 1.1, XML, CSS2 & 3, WebKit
Backend Integration (Drupal, Wordpress)
Javascript frameworks (jQuery)
PHP 5+, MySQL 5+
Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Flash & Actionscript 3

Code Samples

Code samples showing ability my to work with HTML5 & CSS3, JavaScript (jQuery, JSON, AJAX) & PHP / MySQL

Experience

Director, Web Services
Stanford University, School of Earth Sciences
March 2009 – June 2011 (2 years 4 months) Palo Alto, CA
As the director of Web Services my responsibilities included establishing a strategic marketing and communications plan for the school websites, leading the design and development teams, and utilizing JIRA to manage projects within the agreed scope and parameters, with particular emphasis on internal coordination, task planning, resource scheduling, as well as video production of lectures on iTunes U and Stanford on YouTube.

Sr. Consultant, Product Management
Stanford University, Office of Communications
April 2005 – March 2009 (4 years) Palo Alto, CA
As product manager my responsibilities included managing the project life cycle including discovery, resource planning, milestone delivery, ERD review, QA, and product release of a Enterprise Collaboration System. The web application allowed campus wide collaboration between Communication Directors on press releases, annual reports, articles, op-ed pieces, advertisements, and speeches.

Co-Founder, Product Manager
MyWebDB
May 2002 – April 2005 (3 years) Palo Alto, CA
As Product Manger my responsibilities included defining the product requirement documents (PRD) business requirements, use case scenarios and user personas that drove the development of a easy-to-use web application that let users define, build and maintain web applications with no coding. As a principal and co-founder of the business, I was involved in all aspects of the company’s day-to-day operations.

Sr. UX / UI Designer
NBC Universal
August 2000 – May 2002 (1 year 10 months) New York, NY
As lead designer my responsibilities included working directly with network executives, and the marketing team to gather design requirements for a number of online brands , including usanetworks.com, triotv.com, scifi.com, and crime.com. The main project was CRIME, a new USA Networks cable channel that focused on crime stories on spies, serial killers, the mafia, terrorists, assassins and gangsters. The channel was co-produced with John Langley, creator of the TV series Cops.

Sr. UX / UI Designer
Pixelpark, Inc.
August 1997 – July 2000 (3 years) New York, NY
As lead designer my responsibilities includeddesigning flowcharts, wire-frames, concept sketches, mock-ups, style guides, site maps, prototypes, detailed comps, UI functional specifications, and final production graphics for established brands and startups such as MoMA's online store, Procter & Gamble's Hugo Fragrances, Bertelsmann's BOL.com, Deutsche Telekom, and the German Embassy.

UX / UI Designer
Evolution Online Systems
September 1995 – August 1997 (2 years) New York, NY
As designer my responsibilities included requirements gathering, user interface design, product brand design, website design and graphical asset production for websites, and web applications that included an intranet software package for the idealab! incubator, e-commerce sites for Bluefly.com, a medical records databases for Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and SurfBoard, a web browser for Planet Internet, an internet service run by the Dutch Telephone Company.