Photo credit: A.J. Chavar
As the Director of Product overseeing the overall reader experience of washingtonpost.com, Emily Chow works with fellow product managers, engineers, designers and all levels of leadership to drive the strategy and direction of our offerings to Washington Post readers and subscribers.
Previously, she was an engineering manager and the Director of Maps at Mapbox but was interested in returning to her roots — the original start-up of all start-ups — the newsroom — where deadlines are daily, unexpected fires can crop up at any time, and grit, scrappiness, determination and resilience are qualities that drive success. Sitting at the intersection of communications, design and technology for her whole career, she has worn many hats — fact checker, researcher, editor, print designer, front-end developer, team leader, product lead and project manager.
Regardless of roles and titles, she enjoys digging into important problems with smart people — and helping the teams she works with do their best work. Emily believes in investing in people and process to build better technology and in facilitating engineers, designers, product managers and strategists to work together with empathy to find high-impact solutions to critical problems.
During her last stint at the Washington Post, before Mapbox, she designed, built and edited rich visual storytelling that integrated video, photography, audio and words in ways that break the typical article template mold. In her time as a developer and designer, she has built interactive graphics, data visualizations and digital presentations ranging from a drone crashes database to a graphic on the dangers of Great Falls, Va. to the multimedia-driven "The n-word" project.
Emily is a graduate of Northwestern University's journalism program. She grew up in Cupertino, Calif., yet never owned an Apple product until moving away for college. In her spare time, Emily is a volunteer photographer for City Dogs Rescue, a compulsive knitter and an avid baker.
Speaking & Teaching
Code With Me DC 2012: Mentor
AAJA 2013: Google fusion tables with Matt Stiles
ONA 2013: Tools for digital sleuthing with Connor Jennings and Will Van Wazer
ONA 2013: Constructing meaningful infographics with Heather Billings
AAJA 2014: Learn to Code (Basic HTML/CSS/JS) with Frank Bi
SND 2015: On Interactive Graphics and Designing for Users with Emily Yount (Student Session)
AAJA 2015: Scrape Data From the Internet and Get 100 Hours of Your Life Back with Sisi Wei
Mizzou’s JOURN 7508 Information Graphics: Guest lecturer on digital tools and basic HTML/CSS/JS (Winter 2013 - Spring 2015)