8 replies to this topic

[gbarry]

Employee Profiles is a regular forum feature that highlights the people behind the products at Evernote. Recently, Martin was instrumental in bringing about the genesis of Evernote Hello. We sat down with Martin and tossed him these hardball questions.



Martin Cheng
Senior Product Manager
Forum Username: mcheng

Martin, what do you do at Evernote?
I manage a new line of apps that help people become smarter. We just launched our first app, Evernote Hello, which is the app that helps you remember people. I do everything from talking to customers to understand requirements, wrangle design teams, engineers & contractors, evangelize the product, giving plenty of back rubs, foot massages and the occasional bribe...

What is one good thing about working at Evernote? Remember, you’re under oath.
Working on a product that is built for me but is also loved by so many other people.

When you are not working, what do you like to do in your spare time?
Mountain biking, cooking, skiing and traveling.

What do you use Evernote for?
Saving research from the web, cool tips from lifehacker, shopping lists, but most importantly, remembering my “Honey do” list. Evernote’s instrumental in helping me collaborate with my global team too.

Ok, let’s get down to business. What is your favorite food?
I love to cook so I love to try new things but…

You only get one thing, Martin. What’s that one thing?
Fine. If I could only have one thing, it would probably be dark chocolate.

Where is your hometown?
I was born in Hong Kong but grew up in San Francisco. Went to Cal Berkeley and have worked all my life in Silicon Valley. I’m practically a native Californian.

Thanks for speaking with us today!
It was my pleasure, thanks for asking.

[GrumpyMonkey]

Hi Martin. Thanks for the profile.

You know what I would like from Hello (after my rather harsh review in the other thread of the product I have not used yet)? I would like for Evernote to generate a list of links to all of my other notes containing that person's information. We could highlight the person's name (or type it in somewhere) and get the list. Obviously, if we expand this capability to encompass any word that we want to generate a list for (not just names), then you have a pretty powerful feature available.

Anyhow, thanks again for the profile.

[heather]

Hello actually *does* that. That's pretty much the main point of the overall application.

[mcheng]

Yes you can do this today for notes that you create around the same time that you meet someone. For your older notes, we will introduce functionality in the app and on the desktop to allow you to associate notes directly (vs just by time) to your Hello profile for a person so that you can see a stream of encounters and notes in both Hello and the other Evernote apps.

[GrumpyMonkey]

Hello actually *does* that. That's pretty much the main point of the overall application.

seriously? i totally did notget that from e video or site. so, if i have been taking notes on someone's work over the last few years, and have information about them scattered in notes throughoutmy database, i can generate a list of links to all of those notes? wow. i will give it a try. one of my gardening projects now is going through notes and genrating links one note at a time. it is very time consuming and makes me yearn to have a wiki.

[BurgersNFries]

Dude's avatar looks like he can seriously cook.

(I had flames like that once in my kitchen...but it wasn't intentional...)

[heather]

seriously? i totally did notget that from e video or site. so, if i have been taking notes on someone's work over the last few years, and have information about them scattered in notes throughoutmy database, i can generate a list of links to all of those notes? wow. i will give it a try. one of my gardening projects now is going through notes and genrating links one note at a time. it is very time consuming and makes me yearn to have a wiki.

At the moment, it will only get notes about those people based on your interactions with them (time), but future versions will indeed search for other criteria.

[GrumpyMonkey]

seriously? i totally did notget that from e video or site. so, if i have been taking notes on someone's work over the last few years, and have information about them scattered in notes throughoutmy database, i can generate a list of links to all of those notes? wow. i will give it a try. one of my gardening projects now is going through notes and genrating links one note at a time. it is very time consuming and makes me yearn to have a wiki.

At the moment, it will only get notes about those people based on your interactions with them (time), but future versions will indeed search for other criteria.

very exciting!
and, i agree with bnf, he sure looks like he can cook!

[mcheng]

Hah ... the pictures don't show the fire extinguishers and fire trucks