#8 How we think about our product
This was the post that I started to write the last time, before I realized that I had to start with the “why” of our company and our thesis. Now it’s time to dive into our product and features with more detail. After the team, this is probably the most important thing to get right. The quality of your product will be the gravitational force of your company. You can use hacks to temporarily escape from it but it will eventually determine where the company will land. Even if the best product doesn’t always win, a bad product for sure won’t grant success in the long run, so why not give the necessary attention to something that is so essential? This is how we think about product development and why we care so much about it.
Decisions
When thinking about building a SaaS product for the SMEs of the football industry, we could’ve taken different directions. One would be packing our software with all kind of features that could useful for a football coach: a calendar, training planner, messaging platform, etc... Instead, we decided to focus on the thing that we thought mattered the most: video analysis. This not only made sense for us, but it was also the initial feedback we got from coaches. Focusing on one thing allowed us to move faster and avoid the “jack of all trades, master of none” problem.
Another big decision was to bet on a tablets early on. Tablets are basically computers with big touch screens that one can carry around, which is perfect for a football setup. The sport is played mainly outdoors, where it’s difficult to carry around a laptop. Apart from mobility, the tablet also has the perfect size for registering football events (coding) and watching a game on it. Furthermore, with cameras becoming better on smart devices, we see a future where all a coach would need to perform video analysis — from filming a game to analyze it — is a tablet. This is the vision we are pushing towards: one device to do it all.
Workflows
With our product we imply that our users film their games on camera. The workflow of video analysis can be broken down to 3 basic steps:
- Filming
- Coding
- Analysis & sharing
Filming today is typically done with handycams on tripods. Handycams used to be household products until smartphones with good cameras came along and replaced the need for these at a consumer level. However, when it comes to film an entire football match, handycams still seem to be the best option, due to the limited storage, battery life and zooming capacity of smartphone cameras. However, it’s not hard to imagine a future where smartphones become better and people will be able to record entire games on them. Some would argue that this future is already here. It appears to be very convenient to use a device that we already have in our pocket and can be connected to the internet, in case we want to stream the video.
While our software still supports the scenario when somebody records a game with a handycam and sync the video of the game afterwards, we are pushing for a one-device-solution where a coach could use a tablet on a tripod to record the game and simultaneously code some actions on it. Once the game is over, all the coach needs to do is take down the tablet from the tripod and start watching the highlights of the game. Carrying one device means less things to worry about and we believe that it’s convenience what ultimately governs customer decisions.
Coding is a fundamentally time-consuming and tedious task. Today it commonly means that after a match somebody has sit down with a laptop and stare at a split screen: one side has the video of the game, the other contains a bunch of buttons that represent a certain football action (shot, pass, corner, etc). Whenever something happens on the video, the coder clicks at the proper button to tag a moment. These moments can be later visited on the video resulting in a series of video playlists that the coach and the players can watch (all shots, all corners, long passes). The more categories a coder uses, the more detailed the playlists will be, like “passes into the attacking third” or “ball losses resulting in transitions”.
In the future, hopefully a lot of this can be automated either through image recognition or wearables on players, but until we get there somebody has to do this task manually, and we spent a lot of time thinking how could we make it easier. The first thing we did is design something for a mobile device, so somebody could code a game while it’s played. Furthermore, it had to be simple enough to follow the game while sophisticated enough to create detailed reports.
That’s how we came up with a intuitive tablet interface that mimics what the coder sees on the pitch, and allows for quick coding using the finger gestures that we are used to in touch screens (tap, press, swipe). By designing it to a portable device, we opened the door for live collection, which means the coder can be done with the job by the time the game finishes and there is no need to watch the match again afterwards. Additionally we integrated our software with a wireless button that a third party (most likely the coach) can use to tag additional moments remotely. Coaches are too busy to deal with a tablet during a game, but now all they needs to do is click a button when they see something interesting on the pitch. Later they can watch these moments on the tablet.
Analysis & sharing are tasks done by the coach(es) once the game is over. With our software a coach can get the highlights on the tablet even during half-time and show the players some key actions. What’s more common is that coach starts looking at the clips after the game, e.g. on the way home on the team bus. Here again, having the highlights on a tablet results on a more convenient user experience, compared to a laptop. If there is a TV around, the coach can also put the content of the tablet on a big screen (even remotely by using Chromecast or Airplay) and do a presentation for all the players. The wireless button that was previously used for adding tags now serves as a presenter, to pause & resume the video or go back few seconds.
Once the video is uploaded to the cloud, coaches will be able to share their video clips remotely, through the web. Then the players can receive a curated playlist to their own device to review it wherever and whenever they want to. We are working on features that will enhance the experience beyond “just” sharing video clips. Think about adding comments, animations, drawings back and forth between the coach and the players. All of this powered from the central hub of the whole system: the coaches’ tablet.
In summary
The goal with our product is to provide football clubs with an easy way to create and share video highlights of their games. In other words, help them transform 90-minute-long “raw” footages into few-minute-long curated playlists. Another way to look at it is the following: our software allows for the creation a massive amount of data points and video clips on a single football match. We look forward to explore the possibilities around this content, and the services that can be built on top of it for scouts or fans.
While my previous article was about how we think about our industry and the problem we are trying to solve (why), this one was about how in particular are we planning to tackle this problem (what). In the last part of this series I’ll write about how do we think about building a company that allows us to develop a good product and execute our vision.
