Embracing Chaos
At Clipchamp, we’re no stranger to change. We started out building a distributed supercomputer, before moving to video compression, only to land where we are now with Clipchamp, the world’s first in-browser video creation suite. Change is the name of the game. It’s the driving force behind how we operate, improve and create impact for our users.
Whilst, change is imminent in the way that we work, it can still feel chaotic from time to time. We’ve all felt that uncertainty that comes when we introduce a new feature, adopt a new developer tool or test a new experiment and it doesn’t quite go as planned. It’s in these moments of truth and imperfection where we find opportunities to grow and innovate.
Stop, drop and pivot
“We saw a user use picture in picture to create this effect where videos would go from the top left to the bottom left and aligned text next to them to make a really cool intro. Was a kick in the pants that users actually want freehand and are actively finding ways to use the tools to make what they want without it.” — Patrick McCallum — Software Engineer
Despite running various experiments, validating with our users and developing a feature that we believed would best meet their needs; we’ve learned that users still end up surprising you sometimes. It can feel gut-wrenching sometimes when a feature you designed and developed doesn’t make sense to a user or they don’t use it in the way you thought they would. This was definitely one of those ‘expectations vs reality’ moments where our picture on picture feature was utilised in a way that we didn’t initially expect.
Whilst this was unexpected, we were able to clearly see that the option for a freehand feature was what our users wanted as they demonstrated their willingness to innovate within our product. Once the initial shock wore off, we were able to use this experience to pivot and prioritise freehand as a feature.
“We get an appreciation for the user’s struggles. We want to learn from these things, if we break stuff, at least we get to learn from how people are using our product and how we can improve it afterwards. We get to improve the next iteration with that knowledge in mind” — Timo Hillmann — Software Engineer
At Clipchamp, we’re not afraid of failure. We view our mistakes as opportunities to persevere, learn and return to the drawing board with a drive to try something different. Another recent moment of truth that we experienced was when we launched our screen recording feature to enable our users to create presentations with a variety of different software.
To our amazement, we quickly learned that our users were using the recorder to record Clipchamp itself. This became tricky for our users. As the feature was meant to capture and record other programs or software external to Clipchamp, every time our users pulled items into the timeline within Clipchamp, the screen recording function would stop.
As a result, our team used this experience in the same way they approach user feedback. They began to explore how might we support our user best by considering the way they would ideally like to use the feature and prioritising how we can put our efforts on what are the right issues to fix.
But what if things break?
“ We can’t really make a great product unless we make mistakes along the way. We embrace failure and allow people to go through that learning journey” -Dewi Wahyuni — Product Manager
We intentionally aim to strike a balance between flexibility, agility and stability so we can better respond to our users’ needs as they evolve thus creating a greater impact for all users. On the scale of being timely and complete, we consciously strive for being timely based on the feedback we receive from our users and take action towards resolving their challenges. With each feature we launch, we monitor their usage and send out surveys to determine how satisfied they are, if they experienced any difficulties using the feature and how they would like to see it improved.
Our product management methodology and approach enables us to make safe bets. We use this data to prioritise roadmap items by factoring the effort needed with the greater impact that it has for our users based on how confident we are. We then compare these items with our plans for other improvements that need to be made for other features and new features that we have in the pipeline. The team works collectively to determine the best order for what needs to be done.
As mentioned above, in some cases, features that we launch might not always go to plan or how we intended our users to use them. As much as we work to minimise risk when we ship features, we know that there’s always a chance the things we work on might not meet the mark. When mistakes happen, it’s not the end of the road; it’s simply a bump in the road that we can navigate. In this case, instead of allocating blame on the team members involved, we focus on learning from our mistakes and work together to identify what we need to do next. In fact, we actively minimise risk by running experiments so we can identify smaller mistakes along the process as opposed to experiencing bigger mistakes after a prolonged period.
This process ensures that the ideas we try, experiments that we run and features we ship take into consideration factors like stability and performance. Instead of constantly churning new features or trying new things, we take time to measure the effectiveness of each feature based on our users’ experience. We also take care in evaluating the way we work based on our long term goals within engineering. We want to confirm we are doing the right thing at the right time for the right reasons. Though, we understand we are a work in progress and that our process can evolve so long as we aren’t afraid to make mistakes and don’t lose sight of the bigger picture.
“It’s accepting that things will always change and to learn how to best work within that change” — Tim Brown — Software Engineer
At Clipchamp, we’re quite comfortable with change. This doesn’t mean we are moving fast and breaking things. On the contrary, we see moments of chaos as moments of clarity, mistakes as opportunities for learning and work together to ensure we view every interaction as a way to understand our users better.
The way we approach product development sets us up for success so in the event that our users surprise us or we experience breakage of some sorts; we’re able to collectively work together to adapt, improve and iterate.
Clipchampions empower anyone to tell stories worth sharing. Our work has a real-time impact on over 10M people and counting from basically everywhere except Antarctica. We’re transforming the way people create and we’re only just getting started! See our current openings here >> https://clipchamp.com/en/company/careers/
