Loom, Product Manager | Creator

Project Deliverables 📚

Outline one or two major improvements you’d like to see in today’s Loom video editing experience. This can include Loom videos created via our Desktop apps (Windows and Mac) and videos created via our Chrome extension.

Why Loom? 📹

Before approaching major improvements that can be considered for today’s Loom video editing experience, it is important to first evaluate Loom users jobs to be done.

Taking a quick browse of some real-use Case Studies, a company might use Loom to help their team:

• Build meaningful relationships with audiences
• Add personality to client interactions
• Strengthen communication with clients across time zones
• Create more actionable meeting follow ups
• Enjoy work more (less repetitive typing, more being yourself!)
• Stay aligned with one another
• …and of course, to get shit done

These use-cases can be broken down into two powerful pillars of why a user would choose to use Loom over any other option:

• Save time: Loom provides a simple, streamlined and fast experience so teams can quickly relay information among one another and clients, without the hassle of typing
• Add a personal element to digital communication: Loom’s narrative screen sharing prioritizes natural, 1:1 communication to help build stronger relationships and better convey messages

Why is saving time and providing a more personal communication experience more relevant today than ever before?

Most people in the modern workplace will admit to struggling with balancing their calendar around meetings and structuring events for maximum efficiency. The desire to systemize work can be seen in the popularity of books like Indistractable and The Checklist Manifesto as well as software like Notion and Todoist. While the digital world removed barriers to allow today’s worker to be more productive than ever, the trend away from 1:1 communication introduced others that have resulted in considerable drain from the workday, such as time spent drafting long emails and interpreting written instruction.

Similarly, the rise of digital communication has stripped away important human elements in the way teams cross-collaborate and interact with clients. For the former, asynchronous work can result in errors when relaying information as compared to 1:1 collaboration due to the lack of visual and verbal cues that help explain complex ideas. For the latter, the presence of channels such as email have encouraged cookie-cutter experiences and discouraged conventional relationship building that is critical for developing lifetime bonds with clients. In both scenarios, the always-on nature of digital work has increased the quantity and decreased the quality of interactions, to the detriment of teams and clients.

Using a tool like Loom allows workforces to re-introduce personal communication in a time-efficient manner. Instead of writing a long email or scheduling a video call, teams can use Loom to asynchronously discuss projects without massive disruptions to their workflow. Similarly, Loom allows teams to better convey instructions and provide more personal strategic advice to their clients by allowing fast, human-centric recording. As Shahed Khan says in the 2019 TechCrunch article “We believe instantly shareable video can foster more authentic communication between people at work, and convey complex scenarios and ideas with empathy.”

Who is using Loom? 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦

I’ve chosen to focus on two real people whom I had the opportunity to chat with.

Meet Jen:

Jen works a Customer Success Manager at a SaaS startup and primarily communicates with her clients through Intercom. Jen dreads writing long support emails, which often feel repetitive, are too long for her clients to follow, and come across as impersonal. In spite of this, Jen cares about her customers and wants to go above and beyond where she can, given her time constraints. Jen started using the free Loom plan about 6 months ago and thoroughly enjoys walking clients through information in a visual way. Jen is responsible for a set of clients and finds video communication helps strengthen her relationship with clients, Jen says “…even though it takes me less time, I feel like clients get the impression that I’m investing more energy vs writing an email. I think they like to put a face to a name and I get it, I’m creating ads for their business and speaking as their brand.”

Meet Behzod:

Behzod is a Senior Researcher at Slack. Behzod’s primary work use case for Loom is to create tutorials for research tools used at Slack. Behzod owns and manages a number of tools, so he uses Loom to create walkthroughs and tutorials. Behzod upgraded to the paid version of Loom so that it was easier to edit videos without having to use any other tools. While speaking to Behzod I began to understand that his experience with Loom before upgrading looked something like this:

Disconnected 💔

When ideally, Behzod and I want his video creation and editing experience to start and end in Loom.

Holistic ❤️

Prior to upgrading Behzod said:

“…The editing I wanted to do was mostly trimming and some annotations. I’m familiar with Final Cut, but using that just felt like overkill for these videos AND I preferred the convenience of having this all in one tool.”

With the upgraded version, he feels the editing experience is sufficient for the fidelity of videos being created. In spite of this, he still feels as though he would benefit from ability to upload his own videos and splice clips together. These features are important to Behzod because a lot of the internal tools he is creating tutorials for already have great, high-quality video content that he would love to leverage and record over.

For the rest of the assignment, I’d ask you to keep these two users in mind.

Customer Research 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦

I dove into the feedback attached to the assignment, as well as the Loom community and roadmap. I quickly categorized the feedback here. I then created a board of all feature requests from passive & detractors here and downgrades here.

Here are some key bugs and feature requests that stood out 🔑:

• Prominent audio problems reported
• Video length getting cut off
• Handful of generic bugs
• Vague “better editing” requests (uploading, stitching together, blurring)
• Custom size recording option
• Video analytics

My to-do list of things to check after reading this feedback:

• Can you add and remove audio after recording a video?
• Is there a cut off for how long you can record a video?
• Can you share videos directly on Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter?
• Can you record internal audio?
• Can you upload your own videos?
• Play around with the trimming tool
• Check for audio delays in recorded videos
• Can you pause a video while recording?
• Can you add text to a video?
• Can I record only a portion of my screen?
• Can I link the video properly on Squarespace, Wix, and Shopify?
• Check out Soapbox split-screen functionality
• Review the resolution of videos downloaded from Loom
• Play around with Screenflow and Vidyard

Evaluating My Ideas 💡

After reviewing all of the above, keeping the core product competencies in mind, as well as sticking to the task at hand of identifying enhancements specifically around video editing, I narrowed down the pool of potential product improvements to three features that would help Loom users both (i) save time and (ii) provide more personal communication experiences. These are:

1. The ability to re-record audio & avatar
2. The ability to stitch together videos
3. The ability to upload your own videos

While landing on these three features I thought long and hard about what Loom stands for and what behaviors the product wants to encourage. I thought about the tradeoffs that would occur when creating an editing suite that truly focuses on efficiency. My assumption is that the Loom product was designed for unique 1:1 experiences that make your audience feel special and that the product was deliberately designed to avoid the noise of typical video editing/sharing/communication.

“People already feel overwhelmed with Slack and email, and if recording videos comes off as more of a chore than an efficiency, workers will stick to text.” https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/19/loom-video/

When reading customer responses and using my imagination to think about all the possibilities that could make video editing great it starts to get quite robust and complex. Naturally, some consumers using Loom may want these robust features because that’s how we’ve been trained to share video; make it look flashy as a reflection of your creativity. I think my job as a Product Manager is to say no to some of these common requests to stay authentic to our product goals and not become another Kapwing:

Just by the homepage, you can tell a prominent use case is for marketers who want to create beautiful content for mass audiences. While it would be easy to follow history by building features that customers are accustomed too, such as movie covers, transitions, text, music, and sounds, these features would not help — and may hinder — the experience for Looms ideal customer.

Rather than using the provided feedback to guide me towards the solution, I interpreted it as a guide that might help dictate some of the problems. My assumption is that people want to edit video to blend clips and audio to make the audience feel emotionally connected to the content and most importantly, to remove imperfections. To quote Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting “People call these things imperfections. They’re not. Aw that’s the good stuff.”

Imperfections are what makes us human and Looms on a mission to bring back humility within the workplace. Looms video editing suite provides a perfect balance between no editing and too much editing options. It’s about thinking smartly about what customers need to do the job, the functionality that should just be there.

I put my three ideas into a framework similar to RICE but because of the lack of some information, I altered the scoring system. The framework can be found here.

Running my ideas through the RICE framework drew me to the conclusion that allowing users to re-record audio and avatar for sections of recorded video would have the highest impact on the objectives shared above. Of note, this would help:

• Reduce time spent recording video, since users do not feel pressure to restart the entire recording process if a slight narrative error is made during filming
• Allow users to film more confidently in work environments since unprecedented sounds that occur during filming can be recorded over
• Increase personalization of video content since users do not feel inclined to record more generic content that can be repurposed

Video re-recording would have considerable use for customer support tutorials, sales demos, onboarding new employees, and sending assignments to candidates.

In terms of implementation, this feature could live inside the existing trimming functionality with the option to trim video, audio (if no avatar), or audio and avatar. Once the audio has been removed, the removed area is highlighted to indicate that the content was removed and users should re-record. Users should also be able to revert audio to ensure nothing important has been accidentally removed.

Throughout the product development process I believe my role consists of:

• Frequent team or company-wide updates (always)
• User & team research (CS & Sales)
  Mark Roberge from Hubspot gave a great talk at SaaStr last year where he touched on the concept of “Film Reviews”. Teams would spend a night every week reviewing and dissecting sales calls, anyone interested was invited. It’s really important to me that developers understand the business case behind the technical requirements and I found meetings like this to help.
  During our daily stand-ups over Slack, I would also try to frequently drop in customer feedback, phone calls, reviews, etc and @ the developer who worked on that feature.
• Prioritization
  Before I run any ideas through a framework, I’ll often run a prioritization exercise with all stakeholders to gauge what everyone is feeling and make sure no opinions go unheard.
• Basic mockups & idea validation with users
• More prioritization
• Working with the product designer to create “final” mockups (bring dev’s to these reviews too)
• Product Requirements doc (if building an MVP would split between must-haves, should-haves, and could-haves) I like this template!
• Creating a timeline & consistently motivating team to execute on time
• Writing features and/or user stories
• Training sales and customer success/support teams
• Working with marketing to plan the product launch
• Working with customer support/success to write help articles
• Closely involved or owning the QA and testing
• Monitoring beta launch
• User research
• Monitor performance during product launch
• Monitor distribution and report on growth
• Get feedback, tie it all back into the development process

All of the above is contingent on how the team I’m joining operates and what resources are available to me. One of my favourite ways to think about the role of a PM is in Brandon Chu’s The First Principles of Product Management. Brandon writes “…A PM needs to enable those around them to do better (people/chaos) and you need to maximize impact on the company the mission (logic)…there is no better analogy for how a PM should think of their role than the coach of a team sport like basketball, volleyball, football, etc.”

Final Words

In an era where consumers desire authentic connections and need to make the most of their time, Loom is a powerful tool that can reshape the way we communicate in the workplace.

More user feedback I used to write this piece:

Thanks for reading! 👋