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

PART 1 is HERE

The Summer is Coming!

I struggle with MVP's, especially when we already have a fully working Video Player that our users like. However, with hindsight, I would have kept the scope of the project far simpler and accepted that it may take longer to get to the final version.

By this point it is late February and Summer is getting closer and we are just about to start development on Video Player 2.0. Summer is important for us as we work mainly with UK based sports teams across Rugby, Hockey, and Football as well as in many schools. This means that the downtime for these clubs and school programs is in the summer. It was therefore important to me that we release for testing by the middle of August and get the Beta version out to our users by Mid-September as releasing in-season would be disruptive and we would miss the opportunity to get new teams on board.

I met with the Dev team and planned the project, with a deadline of mid-August, which we all knew was really tough to meet. We try to avoid working to strict deadlines as it means the quality of code is compromised by the need to release in-time. When possible, I would recommend not having a long-term hard deadline and making promises to customers that then put the development team under pressure to release.

Scope Creep

The next few months are a whirlwind if I am honest, the guys were releasing often and getting feedback from the team and users. User feedback is essential and needs to be considered, however, I should have been better at separating the essential changes required to make the user experience better, with the cool new feature ideas. The cool new feature ideas quickly became part of our summer release, which put even more pressure on the release date. This is called scope creep and is inevitable, especially on a longer-term project with many small releases and feedback loops.

One of the main areas for scope creep was the Playlist feature. This started out as a simple feature that gave the user the ability to join multiple clips together and create a new movie. For example, in rugby, a user might want to send out all the lineouts (see below??) as a single movie or all the attacking clips they would like to discuss prior to training.

Then the feedback came back that it would be good if:

• I could combine clips from multiple games to create season highlights
• I could reorder the clips in the playlists before creating the movie
• I could change the length of a clip in a playlist without changing the length of the original clip
• I could set sharing permissions to view or edit the playlist with groups or individuals
• I could search for my playlists
• I could present the playlist from the Coach Logic video player, rather than downloading or sending to the feed first

All of the above was added into the scope of the playlist release, causing the project to slip past the original deadline of Mid-August.

Beta Release

After a monumental effort from the team, we got the first version of our full video player out for internal testing by mid-September. It was then all hands on deck to start manually testing across all devices, web browsers and versions. The tough bit about creating a product that is online and available across all devices is the number of different systems we have to consider. Something that might work on a Samsung Galaxy using Chrome is not necessarily going to work on an iPhone using Safari or an old windows computer using Edge. We have given up on Internet Exploder ??

After extensive internal testing, and bug fixing we released the new video player in beta to a subset of users. These were customers that we had great relationships with and we were very honest about the benefits and risks of using the video player in this state. After a few crashes but overall some really positive feedback, we were ready to release to all users in beta by November 2019.

As many of our teams were used to their processes and mid-way through their seasons, we decided to make the existing video player the default player, with an option to try the new beta version.

The beta version had tutorials and a feedback option, plus we were recording all the interactions on the video player so that we could continue to iterate on the user experience and quickly identify errors.

After the successful release in Beta to our current users, we made the decision to push all new Coach Logic users to the Beta version by default in December. The thinking here was that we were comfortable that the new video player was stable and offered a better user experience to the user, however, we did not want to force our current users to learn a new process mid-season.

Since the release to all our new users, we have noticed a positive impact on our Free Trial to Convert pipeline, which is great. As the video player is so flexible, we have seen some weird and wonderful use cases, which I plan to release as a 'clever hacks' video in the near future. Overall, the experience has been stressful but rewarding, much like every other experience so far on this journey! I need to say a big thanks to our dev team who have worked tirelessly to get the video player out, and to our users who have been really patient, it definitely pays to develop strong relationships with your users ??.