Fredrik Danielsson, Principal Product Manager at Tiny – Interview Series
Unite
Fredrik Danielsson, principal product manager of TinyMCE, an enterprise-grade WYSIWYG rich text editing component.
Fredrik is an ardent software and web app designer turned product manager, who revels in the detail. With 20+ years’ experience working across web design, UX/UI, design, marketing and software development, he specializes in web apps and services that serve the precise needs of the enterprise sector. Over the past 5+ years, Fredrik has shifted from being the product designer to product manager of TinyMCE as it’s iterated through versions 3 to 6. He’s played a crucial role in helping to bring the codebase of TinyMCE into the modern world and focusing on creating scalable components that can affect notable improvements in users productivity, content creation workflows and efficiencies.
In his current role as the principal product manager of TinyMCE, he makes sense of how other designers, developers and engineers utilize and customize TinyMCE within their own software projects. He’s constantly exploring ways to bring the user experience into the core of the editor and collaborating with the engineering team on novel ways to implement complex features in a simple form.
Can you explain what WYSIWYG is and the benefits it offers?
The term as we refer to it dates back to the beginning of the web, when the way to publish content online was to write HTML. I remember there were classes for people to learn how to “author” HTML, but to no-one's surprise, the idea of teaching everyone to write HTML to publish content online didn’t fly. As word processors before the internet had shown, users much prefer to see what the document looks like as they create it, so the concept of the what-you-see-is-what-you-get, or the WYSIWYG approach to writing HTML became the norm for how non-developers write their blog posts, essays, news articles, poetry, chat messages and everything between.