Inside Product Development at Clipchamp
At Clipchamp, we empower anyone to tell stories worth sharing, which is no easy feat. We’ve built the world’s first in-browser video creation platform, and we’re only just getting started. Every day we’re inching closer to democratizing access to video storytelling for all who have a story to share.
Over the past year, we grew to a team upwards of 40, reached over 10 million users worldwide, with more than 2 million new users added since February 2020 and empowered millions of stories to be shared through video.
Whilst we are ecstatic about our progress so far, we are far from being done. In fact, at Clipchamp, we are never done. There is always a way to deliver a better, more impactful product to our users, especially when continuous improvement and iteration are embedded in the way we work.
We all get a say.
“Often businesses take a feature-factory approach to development. They’re always adding new ideas and for development teams, it can feel like they’re always running at top speed. They never slow down and try and understand what problem they’re solving and whether it is the best solution, it’s just about getting that feature out the door and moving on to the next thing” — Josh Duck, Engineering Manager
Contrary to a feature-factory approach, we put the user experience at the forefront of how we operate. The key driver for our success is delivering a product that anticipates, answers and evolves to their needs.
Success, in turn, requires every function of our business to focus on working together to better understand our users thus improving the way they experience our product.
“It’s always based on what we think is going to be successful and deciding what to focus on together as a team. Since we have flat structured teams, we decide ourselves how it’s going to get done, as opposed to being micromanaged or commanded to write a thousand lines of code every day” — Patrick McCallum — Software Engineer
To achieve this our team members across the organisation are product-oriented; no one team owns the product.
Our squads consist of 6–10 individuals working together to make things happen. Each team has a mission, solving specific product challenges and owning responsibility for set stages of the user experience. Clipchamp squads are cross-functional — with a Product Manager, Product Designers, Growth Marketers, Engineers, and containing all the skills and tools needed to design, develop, test, and release to production.
Ideation comes from everyone; not just product managers, not just customers and not just the leadership team. Every team member in each squad has the responsibility of unearthing opportunities to improve and iterate. Through understanding our users, we collectively share, analyse and measure the performance of our product based on their experience.
Data drives product creation
“One of the things that stood out to me when I joined Clipchamp was just how smart everyone was and how good they were at their job. No one is going to drop the ball, no one wants to, especially at Clipchamp.
The way we do things is always driven by data. We measure the results and if it doesn’t work, we learn from it and move on. We’re always rolling things out in a way to make an impact whilst disrupting our users as little as possible. It’s professional, well thought out and highly developed” — Patrick McCallum — Software Engineer
We look at the full picture to measure and understand the impact of what we build. This means we are always testing minimum viable options to uncover what our users are enjoying and specifically what they are struggling with.
On top of that, we know that external forces, such as industry changes, changes in working styles and various types of projects, impact our users’ experience. Since we never know what might happen, we work in a way that allows us the flexibility and speed to appropriately react.
Experiment, Test, Learn, Repeat.
Whilst the data that we receive helps us have an understanding of how our users are talking about and experiencing a particular problem; it’s up to all of us to innovate, brainstorm and test ideas.
Without experimenting our data means nothing, we need to continue to fail fast and learn on the fly.
“Getting to take the lead on a particular feature and seeing it through can be very exciting, and even though it’s all on you, knowing that you took a feature from an idea to customer-ready is really exciting.
So we always try to get things done by what we think is going to make the most impact for the most people and try and do it very quickly” — Mark Holmes — Software Engineer
Clipchampions are all co-owners of the product experience and aim to understand the impact of what they’re building whilst putting user experience above all.
We are constantly listening to our users, whether through the data or from talking to them directly. From these conversations, we share the insights with the wider team so everyone has an understanding of the experience our users are having.
Creating a culture for experimentation has a significant impact on the growth of Clipchamp. Many of our best features released in the last few years were born out of conversations with our users, hack days, cross-functional collaboration between squads and a commitment to our mission of making it easy for anyone to create amazing video content.
Take built-in webcam recording for instance. This feature was developer-driven and began simply as an idea at our most recent hack day. Long time Clipchampion and software engineer Mark, took the opportunity to create a prototype based on his knowledge that our users had expressed interest in this feature.
Whilst this started out as a user ‘nice to have’, it quickly became ‘essential’ once the projected impact of webcam recording for users increased based on user data and activity within the app.
The wider team provided support to Mark in bringing this idea to life both as a prototype and a fully-fledged feature that was pushed out into production within a month post hack day. As a result, our users can now record webcam video content without ever having to leave Create.
“We are very experiment-driven. We need to be so that we can try out ideas and get data to help us understand our customers. Being able to build, ship, measure and iterate the product which is then seen by millions of users, is a skill that we expect our engineers to have.” — Josh Duck — Engineering Manager
We successfully innovate through experimentation as an integral part of everyday life and by creating an environment where curiosity is nurtured, data trumps opinion and anyone in the business can voice their ideas.
When it comes to our product, we know how we do things today will evolve tomorrow. In fact, knowing that there’s still so much more we can do is what makes developing our product exciting. We are looking forward to having more conversations with our users, fulfilling more opportunities to experiment with ideas and empowering anyone to tell stories worth sharing.
Clipchampions empower everyone to become a creator of awesome video content. 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/
