Coach Logic | The Journey to a New Video Player | Part 1 of 2

Transitioning from a PE Teacher to leading the product and development team at Coach Logic has been a pretty steep learning curve. 

We recently released our new video player, which I am very proud of and I thought it would be good to reflect on this journey.

It's not been an easy path to Video Player 2.0, so I wanted to share this experience and be honest about the hard lessons I and the team have learned along the way. 

#connectthegame #product #coaching #leadership #learningcurve 

I have been meaning to write up the journey we have been on at Coach Logic to get our new video player out. It started back in December 2018 and was released in Beta in November 2019.

It's been a huge learning curve for me as the CPO and for our Development team, taking on a project like this. It's a million miles away from my days as a PE Teacher at George Watson's College, where I was considered the Tech guy because I could get Apple TV to work! I feel like every step since founding Coach Logic with my teammate Andy Muir back in 2011 has been taken with equal measures of naivety and resilience. It's easy to look back and think, "how did I think this would be so straight forward?" at every step you make. In reality, without this unwavering optimism (positive word for naivety ??) we probably wouldn't have got passed step 1. This step wasn't any different...

A brief history for context

Andy and I created Coach Logic in 2012 after being frustrated with the way Video was being used by coaches as a statistical-makerupper (noun or adjective) and finger-pointerer (definitely an adjective..or noun) rather than a hugely powerful learning tool.

The fact that we had zero coding ability between us, didn't put us off and we set to work on founding a tech company! Ha! After lots of chat on all the features a team needed, Andy created a stunning (sarcasm) interactive PowerPoint. I wish I could find it now to attach but I don't, so just imagine a James Bond game ie GoldenEye for the Playstation or Xbox 360 and replace entering a bad guys lair with entering a team's changing room, and being able to then enter rooms called ''Team Room', 'The Gym', 'Video Room' and 'Medical Room'. The 'Video Room' had a huge TV in the middle of it that you can watch videos on and comment under.

So armed with this and a solid business plan...

(that had us taking over the sports market about 3 years ago and me being on my private yacht right now, instead of a 5:40 am train to London ??. I hate taking selfies ??)

.....Andy and I managed to get some grant funding and a web development company to take on the build. It certainly wasn't an MVP (Minimal Viable Product) but we got it out and got people using it straight away. We then used Starbucks as our office, after our proper teaching jobs for around 3 years, living the dream! We still call the Starbucks HQ to this day.

We were making money but then putting it back into product development. Our Web Development company Gecko New Media were class and looking back, they went above and beyond, for very little money.

Although we didn't know it at the time, we were iterating the product based on user feedback. This was because we needed to make money and when a user asked for something we thought;

'ok, before we spend this money, do other users want it and will they pay for it?'

This worked for a while but we quickly built up, what I know now to be called technical debt. Essentially over a period of 3 years, we only had the money to build on top of the code that already existed, rather than refactor and create nice new clean code with no other dependencies.

So, at this point, we had enough recurring business, product and market validation to get some investment, leave our jobs and bring in a Senior Developer and a Marketing person. We also got an intern on board to take on the company website, brand and product design. As other companies entered the market and coaches became better at utilising video as a learning tool, the pressure grew on us to keep improving the platform. In particular, the Video Player and its connection to the Feed, as this was our USP. We made a decision to focus on these 2 areas and drop The Gym and Medical Room.

Due to the pressure to keep improving the product from a feature and user perspective, we continued to build on top of the existing code and spent very little time refactoring and cleaning up the code. Fortunately, our Senior Developer was a genius and managed to keep releasing new iterations without compromising the platform stability. I have a far better understanding of how awesome our Senior Dev was now for managing this ??. At the time I just didn't grasp how difficult all this was.

I guess that brings us to the decision to completely refactor the Video Player and improve the user experience.

I have mentioned already about messy code, which in turn causes a slower load time and also reduces our rate of development. The addition of new features over time also meant that our product user flow was complex, as it had not been thought out with so many features. So based on the fact the existing Video Player was stable and our existing users liked it, we gave ourselves time to rethink the video player and began the development of Video Player 2.0.

The journey of Video Player 2.0 begins

By this point (December 2018) we had a development team of 5, with a new Lead Developer in place. I reached out to a UX guy I knew to see if he could help take us through a short design sprint. I wanted to do things right this time.

The design sprint included:

• Outlining the challenge
• User Personas - Who are we building for ie Coaches, Players...
• Lightning Demo - How are other companies solving similar problems?
• Red Routes - Going through the existing data to pin down how our current user flows and most used features.
• Team interviews - Get insight from the whole team from Andy, Sales, Marketing, Development, and Support.

Just a bit more info on Lightning Sprints. For this, we chose not to look at direct competitors but the 'best in field' of solving a specific problem. I got this advice from a guy I met who was charged with (amongst other things) improving Heathrow T5 queuing for BA. Instead of looking at other airlines, airports, he went to Disneyland. Yeah, I thought that too ??, but chatting to him, it just made sense to go to the place that had the biggest queuing problems and see how they handled it.

So we focussed our attention on Online Video Players (Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube) and Video Editors (iMovie, Final Cut, Movie Maker) and other popular content platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, Instagram).

Red Routes refer to the routes introduced in London for major roads on which vehicles are not permitted to stop, these were marked with a red line, hence the term. The goal of this was to allow high traffic volumes to flow freely without obstruction. So within a design context red routes highlight the tasks that deliver the most value and are used most often. For example, viewing a video is used always and by everyone on the platform, whereas editing the video information is used rarely ie on upload and by a few ie the uploader.

As we are a small team, I took it on myself to create some early mock-ups, which everyone laughed at and we quickly moved on ??.

I still think it was an important step at the time as it helped me show what I wanted from a user perspective, based on my personal experience and also of all the informal discussion I was having with our users. I also wanted to get across that mobile was important because we want players to get involved in the analysis process and these guys are Gen Z where smartphone and video is their world.

Fortunately, our design guy is really good and he managed to take all the information we had gathered so far (along with my amazing designs) and produce a prototype that we could get users to test out. Getting early-stage user feedback is really important to us so we know we are on the right track and we wanted to make the new Video Player experience as intuitive as possible. We felt the best place to start this process was with school children, so we got on the road and tested out specific pathways using the prototype. We filmed these events and had the participants fill in feedback forms to capture their thoughts at each stage.

We took this information, plugged it into the information we had already gathered and made any adjustments required to the prototype before kicking on with development.

The final phone version was pretty close to my design ??

In Part 2 I will be focussing on the build, scope creep and the release of the video player in Beta. I'll publish this over the weekend. Cheers