We know there's real problems in some of the apps that are out there, both architecturally and from a standpoint of bugs and from a standpoint of consistency. We know that there's a tremendous demand from our users for us to move forward. That's absolutely what it feels like on the inside. And the longer we're underwater, the more our lungs are burning, and the harder it is, but we don't get to come up until we're done. Somebody internally described it as, what we're doing is we took a huge breath, we dove underwater, and now we're swimming. What happens when you come back out into the light? To say, 'we are going to fix this' and then go dark for a little while, that ratchets up people's expectations. It seems like doing it this way, the stakes get a little bit higher. Someone just needed to make the decision, and that someone ended up being me. The board knew that this is where the company was. And from my standpoint, this wasn't something I needed to convince the board about. I knew when I came in that something like this was going to need to be done exactly how we did it.
#EVERNOTE BUSINESS PATCH#
Just patch this over here and put some more duct tape on and let's go.' This is going to last three months until he says, 'No, we need to ship something quick. So all it really took was, at some level, the constitutional fortitude to say 'we're actually going to do this.' And I'll be honest, I think on the day that I stood up in front of a company and said we were going to do this, I think there was skepticism in the audience: Or, if you go out and you ask five random customers, they wouldn't tell it to you in the same words, but they would tell you the ramifications of that problem. All you have to do is walk around and ask five random employees what the problem was, and they would all tell you the same thing. I would assume you'd come into Evernote and everybody internally is aware of this reality, right? It can't be lost on people that there's all this tech debt, and things are overcomplicated.Įverybody at the company knew that. We're not trying to hit some deadline, we're just putting the apps out when they're ready, and an iOS is ready now."Īhead of the launch, I chatted with Small over Zoom as he sat in front of an Evernote-branded virtual background and told me what life has been like inside the company as it has worked to rebuild itself. Why iOS first? "Oh, because the app is ready.
#EVERNOTE BUSINESS ANDROID#
New apps for Windows, Mac, Android and the web will follow "in the coming weeks," Small said. Now, 18 months later, Evernote's launching a new iOS app that has the same name and look as the old Evernote, but is otherwise almost entirely new. Small originally thought it might take a year, maybe a little more. The note editor, the apps, the search, the cloud infrastructure, everything had to change. They would stop building new features and new products for as long as it took to fix the core of Evernote from the ground up in a way that would work better going forward. So not long after he started, he told his team that rebuilding Evernote was now their only job. Small felt the progress on this core stuff was slow and not sweeping enough. Shipped something like an overhaul of the service, along with a few new features and big ideas about the future.īut the brand-new Evernote still had too many of the old Evernote's issues. "The only question was, what do we do about it?" In 2017, then-CEO Chris O'Neill moved Evernote's data to Google Cloud and started the process of unifying the codebase. "I think anyone could have told you that, looking from the outside in," Small said. While other apps were becoming faster, more useful and more powerful, Evernote was slowly becoming a crufty, complex relic of a once-great app.Įvernote's been aware of this problem for a long time. Internally, Evernote employees called the app's codebase "the monolith," and that monolith had grown so big and complex, it was preventing the company from shipping cross-platform features or doing much of anything in a short time. (Even after years of problems, it still has more than 250 million users.) Evernote had five different apps run by five different teams for five different platforms, and each had its own set of features, design touches and technical issues.
When Small joined Evernote in late 2018, the problem had eclipsed the room at the once-highly-regarded and still-hugely-popular company. And eventually, the problem gets bigger than the room that you're in."
"And to have momentum, you need to keep shipping things, and to keep shipping things, you need to keep pushing problems sometimes into the corner and look the other way. "Silicon Valley is addicted to momentum," Evernote CEO Ian Small said, by way of explaining how his company had come to be, as he put it, stuck.
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