In April we launched our long-awaited cloud-native print management solution, PaperCut Hive .
It joined PaperCut Pocket in our new line-up of public cloud print management products.
To celebrate, I wanted to do something a bit different, and shine a light on the faces hard at work behind the scenes.
So I had a chat with a few members of the PaperCut Hive product and engineering teams about what it was like working on PaperCut Hive, and what’s on the horizon…
What did you do on PaperCut Hive?
“I came on board in mid-2018 to start figuring out how we would add embedded devices to PaperCut Pocket. Since then I have been involved in most things related to what we now call, “Printer Apps” - including developing the core libraries, one-click install, copy/scan tracking, and I am now working on integrated scanning.” - Geoff Smith, Distinguished Product Engineer
“I’ve been in the project since the start to help shape and create the platform including the base feature set.” - Vuthy Keo, Product Manager
“I moved from Mobility Print and joined as the tech lead in the early days, two months after it started. The first thing I did was take the Mobility Print job receiving and printing stack and bring it to PaperCut Hive and our PMITC (print management in the cloud) platform. I cleaned up the stack and fit it into PaperCut Hive, splitting it up into different components that are two of the main components of edge nodes.” - Bez Mozaffari, Senior Product Engineer
“I’m new to the team and joined the Partner & Sales Enablement team as Product Lead.” - Belinda Ralson, Senior Product Manager
Belinda Ralson, Senior Product Manager
“I joined PMITC in August last year as Engineering Lead of PMITC Devices in the Cloud team (AKA the “Depth team”). True to my new title, I am leading an excellent engineering team delivering and pioneering numerous features such as Enable Copy/Scan/Fax/Tracking on Sharp, Toshiba, Kyocera, and Ricoh Hive Full Embedded. We recently delivered HP OXPd full embedded in the beta stage. Currently, we are building Integrated Scanning for Hive which you will see in action pretty soon.” - Shalini Sharma, Senior Product Engineer
“I came on board in mid-2019 to bring Ricoh to PaperCut Hive. In January 2020, I took the engineering lead role for PaperCut Hive. Since then, I lead the team to bring Ricoh, Kyocera, Sharp, Toshiba, Fuji Xerox, Konica Minolta, and HP Workpath to PaperCut Hive.” - Atiq Rahman, Senior Product Engineer
What was your biggest victory?
“Laying down the frameworks and libraries that have enabled us to quickly develop solutions for many platforms in a short amount of time.” - Geoff Smith, Distinguished Product Engineer
Geoff Smith, Distinguished Product Engineer
“Leading the team to bring most of the vendors to production to make us vendor-neutral.” - Atiq Rahman, Senior Product Engineer
“Seeing people use the product and get confused, then optimizing it to make it more awesome :)” - Vuthy Keo, Product Manager
“Seeing the first order come through!” - Belinda Ralson, Senior Product Manager
“Getting our very first customer on Hive. What a wonderful moment!” - Shalini Sharma, Senior Product Engineer
“When we were sitting in a meeting with one of our first customers. She installed and printed a job, and we were waiting anxiously for her to click on this confetti animation that was part of the admin onboarding process. She was the first person who experienced that, and we were all watching as it happened!.” - Bez Mozaffari, Senior Product Engineer
Bez Mozaffari, Senior Product Engineer
What was your biggest challenge?
“How to make our cloud solution work with manufacturer software development kits (SDK’s) that were only ever designed to work with on-premise servers, (thank you Edge Mesh!)” - Geoff Smith, Distinguished Product Engineer
“Thinking of ways to create experiences that delight users.” - Vuthy Keo, Product Manager
“There were many moving pieces in this product, lots of different things that could break. Navigating that at all times was a constant challenge.” - Bez Mozaffari, Senior Product Engineer
“PaperCut Hive is a new cloud product finding its feet in the market. There is growing demand for new features, and there are news issues being reported by customers. Making a perfect balance between feature development and stabilising an ongoing product is an everyday challenge and such a good learning experience.” - Shalini Sharma, Senior Product Engineer
Shalini Sharma, Senior Product Engineer
What was your biggest learning?
“I’ve been developing software for a long time, so many of the key learnings are not new. Good design makes a huge difference. The amount of work multiplies exponentially the more a feature is spread across multiple services. Keep concepts simple.” - Geoff Smith, Distinguished Product Engineer
“Using collective minds to solve a problem can help you create wonderful things.” - Vuthy Keo, Product Manager
“The value of doing upfront thinking and designing. At the same time, always reevaluating what we’ve built with a critical eye.” - Bez Mozaffari, Senior Product Engineer
“We have a really good partner ecosystem in place which can be leveraged in so many ways. During Melbourne’s lockdown when we could not access MFDs ourselves, we continuously delivered new features right on time due to the testing done by our partners. Their support and feedback made sure that there was no stopping so far as development was concerned.” - Shalini Sharma, Senior Product Engineer
“With the right mindset, you can build a nice looking functional UI and user flow, even for a complex and restricted environment.” - Atiq Rahman, Senior Product Engineer
Atiq Rahman, Senior Product Engineer
What’s next?
“We’re catching up with the list of features we want to make because we had to prioritize other features. We built PaperCut Hive with a platform-first mindset from day one. There are lots of things we want to do ourselves, or open for other people to be able to contribute. Extra features, add-ons and things like that.” - Bez Mozaffari, Senior Product Engineer
“Looking forward to seeing PaperCut Hive as the No #1 cloud print management software in the market. Is that too big an ask? I don’t think so. We have fantastic teams, solid principles, and the best intention at heart. Nothing can stop us .” - Shalini Sharma, Senior Product Engineer
“It feels like we’ve laid a great foundation for the house. Now it’s time to add the bricks, lay the carpet, and jump in the swimming pool. The next few years will be interesting.” Vuthy Keo, Product Manager
Vuthy Keo, Product Manager
Like the sound of product engineering at PaperCut? Well, guess what, we’re hiring! Have a look at our current openings on our careers page.
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