Coding Like Gaudi — How Powtoon Builds Solid Foundations for Tomorrow’s Innovations
Building Software for the Future… With Architectural Inspiration
We are living through the most exciting time in history. It’s an age in which the next innovation, the next disruptor is rising so fast, all of us have a hard time keeping up. And there’s no field where this pace is more apparent than software development.
We are in the position of needing to create technological infrastructure for capabilities and use-cases that even our customers haven’t thought of yet. In this environment, there’s only one solution: to code like Gaudi.
Now, I’m a marketer… not a coder. I don’t actually code much of anything. But I do understand what it takes to plan something big in the midst of ever accelerating change…
Pace of Change
Just to paint the picture for you. We are experiencing a pace of change — in technology, in society, in commerce, in information, in just about every field — that has never existed before. And this pace is increasing exponentially.
We’re living right at the bottom of the “hockey-stick graph” of technological change in the world. When you internalize this fact, you realize everything that came to pass in the 150 years from the invention of the telegraph to the popularization of the personal computer was doubled again in the 15 years that followed. In the next 3–5 years, what’s going to happen will be mind blowing. We can’t even picture it.
Here’s the problem — Just because it’s impossible to predict future technology, doesn’t mean we’re absolved from building for it. Especially if what you’re building is a platform you want your customers to use for years to come.
Ok, great. So times are changing and we have to be agile. Everybody says that. Is there a model for working in the dark that can guide us? Is there some place where we can draw inspiration and courage as we all hurdle towards self-driving flamethrowers and the singularity? Or is this just another Medium article babbling on about the pace of change?
The answer lies in sunny Barcelona.
Antonio Gaudi
Those of you who’ve been to Barcelona, will immediately recognize what I’m talking about: When you arrive in Barcelona, all you hear about is Gaudi this and Gaudi that. The cab drivers, the women on the street — everybody is telling you to go visit this Gaudi building; go to that Gaudi building. Let me tell you, it’s not just a good PR campaign. Gaudi’s architecture is unique and divine, and if you’re ever in Barcelona, you gotta see a Gaudi…
Gaudi constructed an enormous basilica (or at least he conceptualized it) in 1882, called the Sagrada Família. And it is outrageously huge. When he conceptualized it, he said it would take 100 years to build. 140 years later today, it’s still being built.
When I went there, my tour guide told an intriguing story that resonated immediately with me (though, I couldn’t quite confirm its historicity on my own). When Gaudi drew up the plans for the Sagrada Família, the structure was so enormous that some rooms were completely inaccessible. They were so deep within the structure that no air would get in there, no light could get through — no nothing. Completely unusable.
So he devised a system of vents. How these vents would actually operate, no one knew. The people at the time asked him, “What’s this, what are you creating this for? You’ve got rooms you can’t use with vents that can’t possibly work.”
Gaudi’s response was instructive, and it can guide more than cathedral builders. He said, “Over the next 100 years, the technology will be built that will allow us to use these spaces, and I’m putting the vents in now.” If Gaudi were alive today, with our accelerated pace of change, his 100-year prediction would elapse over the next two to three years, tops.
Coding Like Gaudi
It’s like Gaudi was designing his building over the horizon. He was preparing for developments he knew he might never see, but that his basilica needed to be ready for. Could we draw inspiration from this approach to build a better Powtoon?
Why, yes! This is exactly the approach our product and R&D teams took when we completely rebuilt Powtoon last fall. The original Flash version of Powtoon faced serious limitations, not the least of which was the fact that Flash itself would be sunsetting soon. We needed to move quickly to meet and exceed the current technological standard. Even more, we needed to build inaccessible rooms, with dormant vents that would one day enable us to take advantage of them.
Activating the “Vents”
We didn’t need to wait long. As soon as our updated system went live, our customers in large corporations were clamoring for more. They needed special security considerations, team management and collaboration, and other capabilities that no large enterprise can do without. Because of the work we had done while we were imagining the future possibilities of Powtoon, we could easily and quickly pivot to build and launch our enterprise solution.
With that beefed-up backend, we could offer more to enterprise users. But we also had new capabilities that we weren’t quite sure would take off at all. Powtoon began as an animation platform, and many people still associate us with animation alone. But with the launch of our new platform, users could use live-action video — either as a base for their creation, or enhanced with animated overlays, text and characters.
We noticed how popular live-action video capabilities were, and we noticed WHAT Powtoon’s users were creating: short, catchy video ads. And all of a sudden, this “vent” we built to live-action videos became a highway of activity. We launched dozens and dozens of optimized templates and a sign-up flow that makes it even easier to create an amazing video in almost no time at all.
And the truth is, just like the Sagrada Família, this work will never really be completed. One of my favorite things to do is to take a stroll by the R&D desks at Powtoon HQ. There’s a vastly different energy in that room than on the marketing team. And I imagine them, like Gaudi, plotting for a day that they can’t see directly, but that they know is coming, and carefully building vents for when the next innovation arrives.
