Summary
I’m Sean McBride, and I’m passionate about combining design thinking, software engineering, and human empathy to build products that improve life and fuel creative expression. Over my 10+ years working in technology at Google, Typekit, Adobe, Intercom, and Habitat Labs, I’ve drawn on my hybrid of product management, design, and software engineering skills in teams large and small to take ideas from concept through research, design, prototyping, implementation, launch, and post-launch measurement and support. I also enjoy teaching, public speaking, and developing the skills of my teammates and peers.
I’m excited to join a team that seeks out diversity, treats others with kindness and respect, encourages healthy work/life boundaries, and builds thoughtful and delightful things for a broad range of people.
Working
Range Labs
- Timeframe
- August 2017 – Present
- Position
- Engineering + Product + Design
- Location
- San Francisco, CA
- Joined three founders as the first employee, spending 80% of my time on software engineering with the remaining time split between product and design
- Building software to help teams work better together using best practices from industry and academic research — Learn More
Intercom
- Timeframe
- March 2015 – August 2017
- Position
- Product Manager
- Location
- San Francisco, CA
- Joined as a hybrid engineer/designer, then switched to product management after 3 months
- Served as PM across the whole Growth team, then Acquisition, and finally our customer support products
- Redesigned the signup process and setup guide, driving a 28% increase in our conversion rate and an 80% increase in the installation rate
- Worked with teams across the company to launch a redesigned navigation scheme that better supports cross-selling and upselling
- Worked with the Dublin R&D team to launch our new Educate knowledge base product, hitting our conversion and activation targets
- Designed and built an importer for new customers with existing knowledge base content, resulting in a 15% boost in conversion
Self-Employed
- Timeframe
- January 2014 – March 2015
- Position
- Jack of All Trades
- Location
- San Francisco, CA
- Designed and built Tweetype (a now-defunct Twitter-based typing game) as a Node learning project
- Planned and executed a successful wedding with my husband Steve!
- Designed and built our wedding website and RSVP system, also in Node
- Wrote a series of posts about designing the wedding identity and building the website
Typekit (Acquired by Adobe in October 2011)
- Timeframe
- July 2010 – January 2014
- Position
- Product Designer, Software Engineer
- Location
- San Francisco, CA
- Led the front-end development and launch of the new Typekit font browsing experience
- Owned and maintained Typekit’s font delivery JS, which is run billions of times each month
- Designed and built Typekit’s first integration with Wordpress.com, a model for future partners
- Worked on design and front-end development for new features, including Lists, Adobe SSO, and Desktop
- Contributed to design and implementation of Typekit’s next-gen web font serving system
- Timeframe
- July 2007 – July 2010
- Position
- UX Designer, UX Web Developer
- Location
- Mountain View, CA
- Contributed design and prototyping to projects for Google Apps for your Domain, including a new signup flow, Groups for Google Apps, the custom Gmail theme designer, and a control panel redesign
- Designed and built a prototype of a novel form of interactive help for new Google Apps users
- Implemented several components for Google’s shared JS component library
- Worked on design and prototyping for the launch of Google Buzz, and later Google+
ShopKick/Mod Four Inc. (Y Combinator S06)
- Timeframe
- May 2006 – August 2006
- Position
- Co-Founder, Designer, Software Engineer
- Location
- Boston, MA
- Accepted as part of a team of four classmates into the third Y Combinator batch
- Designed and built a site for writing comparative product reviews
Teaching
Are Your Future Customers Using Another Product?
- Timeframe
- March 2017
- Blog
- Inside Intercom Blog
- Turned our learnings from building Intercom Educate's new user experience into a blog post
RICE: Simple Prioritization for Product Managers
- Timeframe
- March 2016
- Blog
- Inside Intercom Blog
- Developed a simple framework for prioritizing project ideas and published it as a blog post
- This post was ranked 7th on the blog in total pageviews during 2016, the year it was published. During 2018, it was in the top 5 posts by traffic in every month of the year.
Your Onboarding Has a Shelf Life
- Timeframe
- January 2016
- Conference
- Inside Intercom SF
- Developed and delivered a talk with Stephen O’Brien about iterating on software onboarding experiences
- Edited the talk into a chapter of our Intercom on Onboarding ebook
Designing a (Gay) Wedding
- Timeframe
- November 2014 + March 2015
- Blog
- Medium
- Created a series of blog posts about designing the identity and building the website for my wedding from scratch
- The series was recommended over 80 times and read by over 2,500 people
More Than Type
- Timeframe
- April 2013
- Conference
- TYPO SF
- Developed and delivered a talk about the educational and editorial aspects of Typekit’s product
Bridging the Client-Side/Server-Side Divide
- Timeframe
- May 2012
- Conference
- O’Reilly Fluent Conference
- Developed and delivered a talk about building the Typekit font browsing UI and the unique client/server template rendering system that we created for it
- I also gave this talk to other groups, including an engineering group at Airbnb
A Renaissance in Web Typography
- Timeframe
- April 2012 + October 2012
- Conference
- TYPO SF and TYPO London
- Delivered a talk about web fonts, how they work, and how they’re changing web design
- I also gave versions of this talk on a recurring basis to students in a course at CCA
Get the Look: Use Font-Face and CSS3 Like the Stars
- Timeframe
- March 2012
- Conference
- SxSW
- Developed and delivered a talk about using web fonts and CSS3 to translate iconic design styles into new mediums
Breaking Layouts for Better CSS
- Timeframe
- March 2009
- Conference
- SxSW
- Developed and produced a screencast for SxSW 2009 extended content
Life of a User 101 and 201
- Timeframe
- July 2008 – July 2010
- Conference
- Google Internal
- I was part of a group of designers teaching internal “Design at Google” courses to batches of new Googlers each week
- As of 2012, I held the record for most times presenting the 201 course
HTML/CSS/JS From the Ground Up
- Timeframe
- March 2008 – July 2010
- Conference
- Google Internal
- Co-created a four hour web dev fundamentals class with 3 other Googlers
- Taught the course many times to Googlers all over the world and received rave reviews
- Made a screencast version of the course materials, which were eventually released publicly
Learning
Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
- Timeframe
- August 2003 – May 2007
- Location
- Needham, MA
- Earned a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a 3.9/4.0 GPA
- Received full tuition and room scholarship for four years
- Unique engineering-only college with project-based curriculum and 75 students per graduating year