Position : Product Manager & Design Lead
Platforms : Symbian, Nokia Web OS
Responsibilities : Product Management, Platform Design & Definition, Collections Service Design & Definition

I was the lead PM and designer for Here.com platform API and 3rd party SDK, formerly Ovi Maps (now Nokia Here – Sold to Audi, BMW, and Mercedes in Aug, 2015 for $3 billion.). I defined and designed the building blocks which would be available to all third party developers via the Ovi platform and worked on the common components which would tie all developed apps together. I managed strategic implementation with a team of ~12 developers and cross platform alignment of design with ~10 designers. I worked with the first external developers to get feedback and iterate on both design and implementation.  The framework and sample designs are above.  I also played a role as the product manager on collections – an internal Nokia service – which is available on Here.com.  Collections, in short, are playlists for locations and places – allowing you to collect and pivot through all your favorite places, by temporal, locative, or socially constructed information.

Prior to the Microsoft partnership, Nokia had been trying very hard to update its offerings to include more location-based infrastructure within their handset’s firmware. In late 2007, Nokia acquired Navteq making them the worlds largest owner of local data information.  Including access to this data, we were also creating a new mobile OS to replace Symbian on smart phones – at a system level, this new OS, had an global map layer below every service application on a handset.  The project was very interesting, as we were creating OS level design patterns on how to navigate through a phone and all it’s apps, pivoting on contextual location information.  Privacy, sharing, and safety concerns for the user at the OS and app level were both raised and considered as we contemplated the global components of the platform, like the “service switcher” described above.  Because of the scale of many of the services we were developing and the intricacies of interdependence, this project not only allowed me to deeply understand mobile location issues, but also better understand the extreme need for modularization and flexibility when designing mobile service platforms.