Carefully Crafted, Freshly Squeezed

When I joined issuu as a Senior Product Owner exactly one year ago, the thing I first noticed was the care and passion with which everything here is crafted. From the beautiful content being uploaded by publishers to the animated discussions of technical architecture, an acute attention to detail was everywhere I looked. These were definitely my kind of people.

During my first week at issuu, I was thrown into a major project — at the time no one knew how big it was going to be — rewriting the core of issuu from scratch. Initially, we were driven by the upcoming changes in the browsers (i.e. the slow death of Flash). However, as we started digging into it, it turned out to be so much more than just about technology. We were re-engineering and redesigning issuu to be ready for the future. Despite working under taxing deadlines, I’m proud to say we still questioned everything and chose better over faster.

With this premier issue of ORANGE JUICE we’ll share the story of our remarkable yearlong journey. It’s definitely not your typical tech story about a shiny new feature or an amazing growth story. It’s much grittier than that. Our story is about the dedication, hard work and sheer guts necessary to rebuild the very core of a massive existing product. And we figured what better vehicle to tell our story than the one that hundreds of thousands of issuu publishers use to tell theirs each month. It’s also the perfect opportunity for us to show off all the big little details we’ve built into issuu’s incredible new reading experience.

Happy reading!

Alette Holmberg-Nielsen Editor in Chief