(2020-09-18) Evernote's CEO On The Company's Long Tricky Journey To Fix Itself

Evernote's CEO on the company’s long, tricky journey to fix itself. 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.

it was preventing the company from shipping cross-platform features or doing much of anything in a short time

In 2017, then-CEO Chris O'Neill moved Evernote's data to Google Cloud and started the process of unifying the codebase. It shipped something like an overhaul of the service, along with a few new features and big ideas about the future

Ian Small felt the progress on this core stuff was slow and not sweeping enough. So not long after he started, he told his team that rebuilding Evernote was now their only job. 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

18 months later, Evernote's launching

Evernote underwent this transformation at an interesting time. A new generation of productivity and note-taking tools, like Notion and Roam and Dropbox Paper, were becoming popular choices in part because Evernote had lost its way a bit. Many of these new tools built Evernote importers, specifically hoping to capture dissatisfied users.

Six months ago, when we could start to see things were coming together and we knew we'd be at the place we are now, we started forking off small teams in the company to start working ahead on this new base on the stuff we want to be shipping.

I know you're not going to tell me the new features that are coming — Nope!

Stepan [Pachikov, Evernote founder]'s original vision was to be an extension for your brain.

Very quickly that vision turned into a single unifying mantra, which was "Remember Everything."

We have extended the idea of remembering to say that what we really want to do is let people remember everything and accomplish anything.

He reorganized the company to focus teams on features and functions, rather than platforms, in an attempt to keep everything thinking about Evernote as a whole rather than a single platform.