Prezi the Medium, the Technology and the Product
Prezi is a cloud-based (SaaS) presentation software and storytelling tool for presenting and sharing ideas on a virtual canvas. There are several innovations around the product: the zooming presentation, the document format handler and the rendering engine.
As we defined the Prezi as a medium, we had to understand how we can make it accessible to the audience of our users. We had to help them to create prezis and collaborate. We had to set our target platforms for all different tasks along the user journey and we had to solve the technical challenges without killing the essence of the medium.
As the company was growing, our product organization changed a lot and every stage of this evolution was important to scale the development. In the very beginning we had one team who managed all developments around the product and as the company was growing we created cross functional teams around platforms. These teams worked and released product pieces separately with almost zero dependency. As the Prezi ecosystem was growing we needed more and more collaboration and we decided to build teams around missions and we separated the technology from the product teams.
In this talk I will talk about the challenges we have gone through.