4 minute read time
Staffer Q&A with Email Developer Stig Morten Myre
In our new Staffer Q&A series, we sit down with staffers to find out the “who” behind Campaign Monitor, get a sneak peek into new features and projects they’re working on, and find out how they add to the strong culture at Campaign Monitor
Hi, Stig! Can you tell us what you do at Campaign Monitor?
My email signature reads “Email Developer”, which is to say I code and test our email templates, develop new techniques, and research the feasibility of new functionality in our email builder.
Beyond that, I’ve also been fortunate to work on projects like The Ultimate Guide to CSS in Email, buttons.cm, and backgrounds.cm. With a medium as finicky as HTML email, I truly appreciate the community of brilliant peers that generously share solutions to our common problems. Getting to put ideas out there for others to iterate on is perhaps the most exciting part of my job.
And lately, I’ve been transitioning to more product design oriented work, still focused around the email builder for now.
You’ve worked on some really helpful projects. Are there any upcoming projects or features you’re working on that you can share with us?
My first product design project at Campaign Monitor is a new way to edit images in the email builder.
We currently use an Adobe integration that’s being discontinued, which offers several different image editing options. What we found was that most people don’t really need lots of image tools. In fact, just two of them accounted for over 90% of all usage: resize and crop.
Learning this information about our customers gave us a great starting point for how to replace the old image editor. We’ve taken a fresh look at resizing and cropping, and designed something that will work much better for most people. We want to make it much easier not just to get the right result quickly, but also to go back and tweak it until it’s just right.
It sounds like you have a really empowering team that trusts you with such important developments.
It’s an incredibly supportive group of people, in every way.
For me specifically, with the rest of my team in Sydney—and me in Norway—it would be easy for me to be left out of the loop. Lucky for me, the whole team actively looks for remote-friendly ways to work together. Which in turn makes it easier for everyone to sometimes work from home or wherever they please.
Working remote hopefully brings with it some opportunity for unique adventures outside of work. What activities keep you energized?
I’ve always enjoyed making stuff with my hands, with curiosity and patience as my only qualifications. Most of my DIY projects involve me getting in over my head and learning my way out.
Right now, I’m finally putting the finishing touches on a bunk bed for the kids, which I’ve worked on sporadically for an approximate eternity. All the while resisting the itch to just go to IKEA.
We’d love to have your Norwegian perspective on this question: What’s your favorite book, movie, song, or album this year?
The “this year” part makes this a hard question.
It’s rare that a book sneaks to the top of my reading list as soon as it’s released, especially non-fiction. An exception this year was It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried, the founders of Basecamp. I’ve followed their writing for over a decade, and this book reads like the culmination of all their experience running a business and a product. It presents some radically reasonable alternatives to many of the practices that are common today, especially at tech companies.
As for new music, the Black Thought EP has been on fairly heavy rotation. From the first verse, he’s in the same zone as his impossible HOT 97 freestyle from last December.
And finally, what’s your spirit animal?
Mid-nineties Jaÿ-Z.
