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When Life Gives You Oranges...

Words by Joel BarnardIllustrations by Maya Gürtler Lorentzen

With the world changing around us, the issuu team saw an opportunity to reimagine the reading experience from the inside out while keeping true to the original issuu vision. Time wasn’t on our side, but our aim to deliver a stellar reading experience everywhere and our commitment to quality was.

If there’s one constant in thetechnology game, it’s change.The better, faster, smarterversion is always just aroundthe corner. Sometimes no onesees it coming. Sometimes itsarrival date is plastered on everyblog, bus and billboard. And inthe case of the imminent demiseof browser and mobile supportfor Flash (the core technologyissuu’s reading experience was

I was really excited to work on this project because we had a chance to rethink all the past established practices. We didn’t do things the same way, just because that’s how they were always done. Instead, we searched for the absolute best way to deal with each task.

— Maciej Pękala, Engineer

built on), it has been a long timecoming. Smartphones never had(real) Flash support, and thedesktop browsers announcedthey would finally be pulling theplug “sometime” in 2016.

Staring down the barrel of thisunknown deadline, we facedthe dilemma other companies

had faced before — could we change the experience millions of people already love in ways that would make them love it even more? Would it be possible to rebuild such a large plane mid-flight? And how much time would we have to do it? One thing we knew for certain is we would stay true to our philosophy of not rushing products to market that we couldn’t be proud of. Of course, this time the stakes were much higher. It was a race we couldn’t lose. And yet, no one knew if doing things the right way would allow us to reach the finish line in time.

All or Nothing

By mid-2015, we began by putting together a rock-solid engineering team tasked with finding a solution. This included several long-standing issuu engineers, plus some newer brains, like the project’s Senior Product Owner, Alette Holmberg-Nielsen. In the very early days of the project, our end goal wasn’t completely clear and a vision had yet to be formed. We were driven by the slow death of Flash in the browsers, but according to Alette, “It quickly turned out this could not — and should not — be only about a technology change. Really, it had to be about

Soren Director

Anders Lead / Back-end

Anders Front-end

Yan Front-end

Frej Back-end

Mie Support

Alette Product Owner

Peter UX

Greta Support

Mads Full-Stack

Rachel Marketing

Setting Up the Team

The team was set up with people having different experience, skill sets and personalities. Four developers had worked on various aspects of our previous reading experiences. Three developers, the product owner and the designer were new. Team members had a mix of artisan, science and philosophical backgrounds, and everyone was highly motivated. One key to our success was our ability to listen to each other (even during heated discussions) and treat each other with respect. We also had a good balance of agitators and moderators. All meetings were open to everyone on the team and those in attendance understood their roles. We almost always pair programmed. And rather than having only experienced people making decisions, we gave newer members a bigger voice, which worked out surprisingly well.

Søren D. ThomsenDirector of Engineering