Every time I glanced at my action item list in early December, it seemed like a mess. The holiday-month can be ruthless for a product manager if not planned accordingly and my plans were definitely in need of some heavy adjustments. Then things slowly got sorted out, I would say, almost by themselves and my action item list got a bit more friendly every day.
We like to use the word automagically. You want to know why a media thumbnail in Studio was spinning forever then why it loads properly the next morning. When developing software, it’s something that we must find reasoning for. It’s a glitch in the matrix and that cannot be left unaddressed. But what does it have to do with anything?
One of the challenges before Christmas for the Studio team was finishing Zoom integration. Chances are that you are reading this from one of the few schools which already integrated Zoom with Studio! The feature allows you to automatically import your Zoom recordings to your Studio library if those are saved to the Zoom Cloud. The closer we got to the holidays, the more we had to tweak our plans to get it out on time, but somehow… we delivered it more than a week before our own target.
Another fantastic effort was pushing down the number of bugs. We take bugs seriously and we have exact numbers where we want to be in an ideal case at any moment. We had an overwhelmingly high number in November, so to mitigate the situation we identified our targets for the next one, three and six months. Then I am finishing up my work on a late Thursday in December and I am facing the fact that we reached our 3-month target within one.
I could have started to dig up the hows but I realized that I would probably get to the same root-cause over and over again: Studio has a fantastic engineering team behind and people here actually care! This was especially reassuring since I spent most of December in the U.S working with a 9 hours time difference with the team which was less than ideal.
I finished the year with the best experience possible: I had my first face-to-face customer meeting. Long Beach Unified School District (LBUSD) in Los Angeles accepted my visit on 17 Dec and we had a half an hour long discussion about Studio. One great takeaway from this was another confirmation that new Studio features are usually slowly adopted - and since we have tons of exciting stuff in the pipe, we need to find a way to have users tried out new features earlier.
I am truly grateful to LBUSD for allowing me to add our post-discussion photo here as it’s such a great moment to recall! Thank you again!
So here comes 2022 and we are already 3 weeks into it. The Studio team is primarily working on redesigning the whole Insights page. Expect a more robust way to interpret student viewership data that is significantly easier to navigate in and can also be exported if you wanted to do further reports on your own.
Similar hot topic is video editing. Last year we had several calls with a number of schools to understand why and when editing video content comes handy and how it could provide a better learning experience for students. Video editing is a challenging topic from many angles (accessibility, I am looking at you!) but we seem to have worked ourselves through the most difficult questions and polished our design through several iterations. Actually, if you are interested to see our latest design, then drop me a direct message here with something like “I want to see video editing in Studio before anyone else” and I will reach out to you right away! We could definitely use some feedback here!
Hope you enjoyed this little snippet!
Take care,
Akos
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