It’s a great time for the whole Product group at PrestaShop and we want to share with you why we are so excited!

In a nutshell, we are starting out on a journey that will get us to a new major version of PrestaShop. We feel very humble but also very determined. Here’s why.

Together Everyone Achieves More

Like any other adventure, it’s all about the people you want to live it with. The core product team is made of various breeds: developers, QA, designers, content specialist and product managers.

We decided to create dedicated teams for two main reasons: reduce the context-switching burden and to get the best from all team members.

Of course, there is another important team member we want to include and this is you! As you’ve surely seen, we have already started to share some of our thoughts, and we will keep doing it on Build, Gitter, the forum or our User Club.

Keep It Simple Stupid

Well, this one is a tough one. It’s not that simple to manage, create, improve a product, especially when this product is used by so many people across the world and has such a strong community.

So we decided to determine a clear product focus in order to keep things simple. Based on this product focus, we have a list of user stories and features we would like to address. At that stage, you should see them as a list of opportunities which will surely evolve over time but, as mentioned above, you’ll always know what is going on.

So, what are we up to?

Our main product focus is to simplify the creation of a shop. On one (good) hand we have a lot of features dedicated to the shop creation but on the other (bad) hand, we know that merchants are still struggling to do it. We think we can improve it by starting to shape a new user experience.

We have two main user flows that we want to address:

  • Ease the product creation

    Retail relies on three core pillars: the offer, the price and the service, and it is far from being an easy job. This is definitely why we want to tackle one of these core pillars to improve the way merchants create their products in PrestaShop.

    Vincent (PM), Julie (Designer), Julien M, Luc and Xavier (developers) will work on this user flow. They will keep you posted along the way.

  • Improve theme creation (and maintenance)

    This one is not dedicated to the merchants but it will still impact them. Indeed, we want to make it easy for designers to create kick-ass themes! This is the best way to inspire merchants and above all their clients. In order to do this, the first step is to rethink the way our themes work and the second step is to make sure designers can easily do what they are best at: inspire us!

    FM (PM), Adrien (Designer), Julien B., Maxime (developers) will work on this user flow. They have already started to share their thoughts, talk with some of you and publish what they are working on.

Last but not least, we have a list of minor improvements that have been collected by our Product Managers over the last months.

As mentioned above, we will keep you posted mainly through this blog but also through the User Club, Gitter and the forum.

We are targeting a release date in Q1 2016.