Nicole Miñoza

Adobe

Fonts & Typography · Digital Media ($17.65B segment)

Director, Product Management, first Product Director for the business|June 2023 – February 2026 · Seattle, WA

Scope

Led 6 product managers and set direction for a ~75-person cross-functional organization. Horizontal service; the north star was Creative Cloud membership value and retention. Charter: scale typography across Creative Cloud, Adobe Express, and Acrobat while pivoting the roadmap to generative AI.

Positive Highlights

• Proved typography drives revenue (FY25): redesigned Adobe Express font recommendations, lifting free-to-paid conversion 186% (0.5% → 1.42%) and making typography one of Express's top premium drivers; users who applied recommended fonts exported at 73.7% vs. 37.3% overall.
• Shipped a new usage-based foundry compensation model (2023): won executive approval and wrote the Creative Cloud–wide communications for a change that removed font entitlements from users. Shipped without backlash, saving $1M in royalty costs in year one and stabilizing royalty growth at 10% YoY while MAU grew 12%.
• Built the business case for Adobe's largest font library expansion in five years (Monotype partnership, April 2025) from observed user drop-off data; owned the go-to-market. Pre-instrumented launch KPIs: 1.2M users adopted fonts from the new library within weeks, failed searches fell 91%, and 21.1M missing-font events were eliminated, bringing Helvetica, Gotham, Avenir, DIN, and Proxima Nova natively into Creative Cloud.
• Scaled Adobe's unified text engine across 11 flagship applications to 15M monthly users with 40x performance gains in core typographic actions; grew Adobe Fonts to 12M+ MAU (2025), outpacing Creative Cloud 3x (11% YoY vs. 3%).
• Shipped Generative Text Edit (raster text editing) in Adobe Firefly Boards at MAX 2025. Owned product vision, strategy, and messaging; secured Photoshop and Express commitments to integrate in FY26.
• Took TyCo (codename) from concept past a go/no-go review with a dozen principal scientists to public beta, with a committed Express Assistant launch. Owned vision, strategy, and messaging; discontinued in Adobe's 2026 restructuring.
• Ran the Adobe Fonts website as both funnel and product lab: FY25 free account signups +36% YoY and unique visitors +17% on 4–6.5M unique sessions/month; tested tags, recommendations, and font pairing on the web before in-app rollout.
• Built the competitive case for Adobe's text engine vs. CSS-based engines; Express marketing used it in positioning against Canva.
• Defined Adobe's typography strategy for the generative AI era: repositioning fonts and text as core capabilities in AI-first workflows across Firefly and Express, including the business case for exposing font discovery APIs to AI assistants.
• Shipped client features at scale: Spell Check (Express), Dynamic Text in Photoshop (16.3% of Text MAU adoption), and the font picker across Photoshop, Android, and Neo.
• Grew Korea MAU 500% (from January 2021) through Korean font expansion, CCJK filters, and website improvements; closed long-standing East Asia text quality gaps.

Adobe

Adobe Fonts & Type

Group Manager, Product & Product Marketing|March 2019 – June 2023 · Seattle, WA

Scope

Pitched for and won expanded leadership: owned both product strategy and product marketing for the fonts business, leading a team of 8 spanning product management, product marketing, content production, and (initially) customer support and enterprise sales. Presented strategy annually to the SVP.

Positive Highlights

• Set the annual strategy for the type organization for seven years (2019–2026). Won SVP buy-in annually, led execution of the resulting product roadmap, and approved mid-year reprioritizations across an organization that grew to 75.
• Won approval for Adobe's first unified text engine (2020): took it from concept to pitch to approval by an SVP and all Heads of Product, securing agreement that every application would replace its own text engine with a shared codebase. Enabled the text engine for Adobe Express and made Adobe's text behavior globally consistent, today serving 15M monthly users. Team grew to 15.
• Shipped the Adobe Fonts platform across Adobe.com and 12 Creative Cloud applications → 11M in-app MAU (unique users actively using fonts). App teams shipped the integration because it made their products better: fonts free with membership, automatic missing-font resolution, the library inside the canvas.
• Architected the usage-based royalty initiative (2019–2022): specified the usage-logging requirements for every app integration plus expiration and deactivation workflows, the activation-to-usage pivot that controlled royalty costs so the business could keep scaling.
• Shipped Express templates and "open in Express" on the Adobe Fonts website (2022), generating ~200K unique referrals to Adobe Express per quarter.
• Launched Add Your Own Fonts and Custom Fonts with dual-audience positioning: millions of user fonts brought onto the platform; added variable fonts to the service (2022).
• Formed and ran the Type Working Group (2020, ~2 years): a standing forum where client-app product owners resolved type roadmap collisions before they hit escalation.
• Developed non-traditional talent: converted a customer support manager into a product manager (later leading the variable fonts launch), coached a senior domain expert to Principal Product Manager, and built a content producer role whose livestream series became one of Adobe's most-viewed.
• Earned executive recognition for annual strategy presentations (“the best APS I've ever seen”, senior design executive).

Adobe

Adobe Type & Typekit

Group Product Marketing Manager|March 2016 – March 2019 · Seattle, WA

Scope

Led marketing, customer experience, and go-to-market for the fonts business with a team that grew to 8 after pitching for expanded scope (absorbed customer support and enterprise sales). Reported to the GM, Fonts & Typography. Charter: simplify and clarify Adobe's typography offering and increase engagement across Creative Cloud.

Positive Highlights

• Initiated and drove the 2018 Typekit → Adobe Fonts rebrand: recognized the removal of activation limits as a rebrand moment rather than a product update, took the case to brand leadership, chose the name Adobe Fonts, directed the new site build, and ran the GTM on a tight Adobe MAX timeline. Result: 40% MAU growth in year one and zero foundry partner losses, repositioning typography from transactional purchase to core membership benefit, ranked the highest self-reported membership value of any Adobe service.
• Quantified the retention case for typography: partnered with Data Science on a causal analysis (run annually from 2019) showing all-app subscribers who used Adobe Fonts churned 42% less the following month, the business case behind every subsequent platform investment.
• Defused three resistance fronts on the rebrand: acquisition employees attached to the startup brand, the web-developer community that had built its workflows on Typekit, and 120+ foundry partners fearing absorption, through individual partner conversations and a reactive messaging guide.
• Migrated paying Typekit subscribers into Creative Cloud entitlements (the riskiest element) smoothly, with no partner attrition events.
• Scaled the library 3K → 36K fonts: owned the foundry-spotlight marketing strategy that made Adobe Fonts the platform foundries wanted their fonts on; MAU grew 35% YoY through the 2018–2022 window.
• Created the marketing strategy behind Adobe's gender-inclusive emoji advocacy (2016–2019): ran media prep for spokesperson Paul D. Hunt (Unicode Emoji Subcommittee; the 2016 gender-inclusive emoji proposal and Gender Legibility Survey) and funded the PR. The work laid groundwork for the 2019 cross-platform gender-inclusive emoji releases, with coverage in Forbes, MIT Technology Review, Wired, Slate, and Mashable.
• Conceived and launched "The Adobe Fonts Show" livestream: pitched senior leadership, secured investment, and produced 56 episodes over 2.5 years on Adobe Live, one of Adobe's most-viewed livestream series.
• Wrote the launch messaging for the five revived Bauhaus typefaces in the global Hidden Treasures campaign with the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and Erik Spiekermann.
• Expanded the Japan market: Ten Mincho launch, Morisawa partnership, MAX Japan; represented Adobe Fonts in media interviews and events in the U.S. and Japan.

Adobe

Adobe Type & Typekit (post-acquisition)

Senior Product Marketing Manager: Head of Marketing, Typekit + Adobe Type|2012 – March 2016 · Adobe Type PMM from 2012; Typekit marketing added April 2013

Scope

Sole senior marketer for the full typography portfolio following the Typekit acquisition, reporting to the Director of Product. Controlled a ~$1M annual marketing budget across PR retainers, industry sponsorships (TypeCon, Typographics), Adobe MAX presence, and campaign production. Context: Typekit grew from ~100K MAU (web-only, 2011) to ~1.3M MAU (2016) on desktop sync and deep app integration.

Positive Highlights

• Architected Adobe's GTM and press strategy for Source Han Sans (July 2014), the first open-source Pan-CJK typeface, a 4-year, 5-company collaboration co-launched with Google under equal-veto governance, addressing 1.5 billion users. Drafted the launch announcement, built the PR plan with Adobe's Senior Director of PR and Google's PR lead, and served as on-call media spokesperson (CNET, The Next Web, Creative Bloq). Outcome: OS-default status across East Asia, 16K+ GitHub stars, 65,535 glyphs per weight, the OpenType ceiling.
• Won the naming case in a five-company negotiation: built the argument for extending Adobe's "Source" brand, carried by the GM against Google's preference, producing the two-brand release (Source Han Sans / Noto Sans CJK).
• Built Typekit's community-driven marketing strategy: experiential and event marketing, blog editorial with personally sourced creator interviews, and launch marketing built around individual designers, and standardized the format across all subsequent releases.
• Owned the Typekit and Adobe Type presence at Adobe MAX and directed sponsorship strategy across the design industry's key events.
• Received formal media training; served as the type organization's trained press voice.

Adobe

Creative Software / Adobe Type

Quality Engineer → Lead QE (type design group) → Program Manager → Sr. Program Manager|July 2002 – 2012 · San Jose, CA

Scope

Joined as roughly employee #6,000 (30K+ today); entire tenure within Creative Software / Digital Media. Started in font testing; advanced to Quality Engineering Lead in the type design group, then into program management during Adobe's hyper-growth years.

Positive Highlights

• Tested and shipped releases for Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat across multiple major versions.
• Eleven years inside the type organization before marketing it. Foundries and engineers already knew my work when I switched: the technical credibility that later underwrote a marketer's authority in deeply technical rooms.

Independent & Board Leadership

AI product work · executive nonprofit leadership

Builder, Advisor, Board Executive|February 2026 – present · Seattle, WA

Positive Highlights

• Shipped Ramón, an AI styling app on the Claude API, end-to-end: wrote the product requirements from real user needs, rewrote onboarding after user feedback into a six-screen narrative, ran a full UX copy audit, explored three design directions and directed implementation against a high-fidelity handoff spec, and personally owned the technical trade-offs: server-side API security, model selection, structured outputs rendered as interactive UI, and a user-editable persona (prompt-as-product, implemented). Working prototype in daily use.
• Built a second working React app: a curated executive prompt library, making hands-on AI fluency a demonstrated pattern, not a one-off.
• Co-chairing BIMA Bash! 2026, the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art's flagship fundraiser, against an $895K revenue goal: helped secure the museum's first-ever Platinum-tier sponsor, presented the development report to the board, authored all non-art auction copy across a 229+ item catalog, and co-MC of the gala.
• Authored a brand-modernization strategy brief for the BIMA board: a nine-institution benchmark (Guggenheim, Brooklyn Museum, SF Symphony, Natural History Museum London, et al.) across three design-mechanic categories with an evidence-graded investment recommendation.
• Global Advisor, How Women Lead; Member, Chief, organizing the Chief Seattle Summer Social (July 2026).