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Catch — Video updates for product teams
Catch is a video messenger for teams at work
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It's great to see communication trends for consumers making their way into the workspace. It makes the work a little more human, and there are some types of communication for which these new models simply work better. Excited to give it a try!
Interesting concept of recording short videos in lieu of interday interruptions or standups. Curious what would happen if they partnered with clark.ai (or something similar) to provide meeting notes as well.
@micah That sounds interesting!
We currently use speech recognition in Catch to provide automatic transcripts during playback because you don't always have audio on.
Avoid excessive email, meetings, or chat using the story format of communication. Easily exchange video updates
Our stand ups have slowly become sit downs that last much longer than necessary. Excited about changing that with Catch!
Hi, do you know if this is blocked in China or not, based on the tech it runs on? Need something like this for our Global to China communications, to replace Skype. Lmk
@bitpixi I don't see why it is blocked. Will ask someone to give it a test later. Too early in the morning in China right now. :-D Which part of China are we talking about?
@alfredqy Most of our team operates out of Xiamen. I haven't had someone try it there yet on/off VPN, but maybe I can run a test with one of my co-workers later when they are awake. Heh.
@bitpixi I had someone tested earlier in Shanghai. It is not blocked and should be good to go for your team.
@koridhandy Great feedback and thanks! Here is a blog post we put together on medium the other day on the reality of increasingly distracting team communications and how we could have a better one.
https://medium.com/catch-blog/wh...
Hopefully the post would shed some light on our thinking process and how we would like to improve for teams.
@alfredqy Oh dude, I get it.. I don't want to get into specifics because its your PH day... but my team and I have been busy building tools (private beta) to increase workplace productivity, accountability and transparency within teams, and we also have a similar "Story" feature in the product for quick product transparency, but like I mentioned it's a feature.
@koridhandy @alfredqy some features (SMS >> Twitter) become gigantic companies. The simplicity of a competitor doesn't mean they are valid. :) Another example ... AWS.
@sridhar_kondoji We will be building a SaaS model around Catch when we see the right traction and demand for additional value.
Great to see this idea come alive. Congrats to the team. Asynchronous standups are absolutely better for some workplaces. But I have seen firsthand how running them in slack is totally culture killing. You lose the person you are working with! Stories seems like a great way to address that. Will be interested to see where you take it from here. What other workplace communication could run through this platform?
@sonofsarah Thanks Isaac. We have a bunch of ideas but I'd love to hear some answers from other product hunters to your questions "What other workplace communication could run through this platform?"
To each fair its own share: after some time playing with it, I found a couple of use cases to which Catch can really be a kick-arse resource for teams.
We'll be taking it for a spin in a small project/team. The ability to create scheduled/recurrent “Topics” functionality is really an awesome feature.
Instead of a virtual stand-up app, such as it is, we simulated using it as a milestone/delivery agreement and approvals log; and its fantastic.
Each Topic can be a step forward into development, as it then can serve as a full record of everybody's approval, comments, agreements and whatnot.
I'm starting to see some exciting possibilities for Catch, not necessarily within the Stories concept, but really cool nonetheless.
Stories is a great concept and it's really nice to see new avenues towards it.
However, what is this thing with people saying that stories is a more efficient way to communicate and update without breaking focus?
Every time you update anybody, regardless of how quick the medium is, focus is broken. I reckon there is just a lot of overuse of the medium ahead of us.
Even though stories can be a meaningful asset to any team, there is a reason for things such as standard standup meetings and other types of regular updates to exist, how they produce history and favour insights further ahead into development (which we all know how important they all are).
One thing is not a replacement for the other, can't be and I doubt it will never be. Plus, this will require tons of education and buy-in into a message that from the get-go, from a user experience perspective, is FAR from ideal.
All I see is another, extremely well done and well put together, video chat app.
Sincere congrats for that though.
@sridhar_kondoji sure thing, I also see the same. However, even though email sucks, there is something it can do for us that no stories application can: record.
No he said she said I said they said… from simple day-to-day, mediocre/boring routine stuff to epic legal battles. Record.
Does that type of communication needs great problem-solving?
Indeed it desperately does.
Is stories the most adequate answer?
Is that problem solved with such approach?
Nope.
Stories, under these lights, are in addition to the distraction problem; not a subtraction.
@lyondhur @sridhar_kondoji I love this discussion. I'd like to add a few points:
1) Good stand-ups aren't always possible. Teams aren't always in the same room. There are microphone problems when remote and balance issues when not everyone is distributed. People sometimes ignore everyone while they try to decide what they'll say. That said, meeting in person and discussing things is hard to beat when you can do it.
2) The stories mechanic of communication is passive like email as sri notes but with more emphasis on recency. We haven't fully adopted ephemeral messages for our status stories though. This is for work after all. We provide day by day archives so you can swipe back to previous days.
3) We rely too much on text and chat and need to get back to human communication. But we need it to work for global companies.
What do you think?
@ryan_dewsbury I've been a PM, product owner and agile coach for about 10 years now. I am also a trained designer (Product, UX and IxD) working with teams from government, private sector and startups for 7.5 years. There's nothing I'd like more than solving that kind of problem and I am always pushing old establishments to experiment with new things.
Don't get me wrong here, I love audio and video instead and logged text and chat (as I increasingly dislike the latter).
When you mention "day by day archives" that changes a lot the concept of Stories, as it is. In a positive manner. Nonetheless, it kind of hijacks one concept over a more common one: a video log/feed app. Again, quite positively.
As per breaking focus, I've always said that doing that isn't actually a problem that needs being solved. Breaking focus is a natural part of design thinking fundamentals and development in general.
Even if that was a problem at all that needed solving, an interactive video-log dubbed as Stories wouldn't do it.
@ryan_dewsbury ...
Culture solves many of these problems and I have seen incredibly productive teams work across the globe with only an Asana free account and a scribble board up on the all.
This app, as well as many others, also cannot escape the fact that it undoubtedly needs the right culture and the right team environment for it to work as well. This is what I said before about Stories not being fully able to solve the most pressing problems of team-comms as it is, but it is also not for everybody by default.
There are a LOT more UX under-layers to this issue and a complete solution would encompass it from a systems approach, instead of a functionality one.
I completely agree with @koridhandy statement when he says this feels like a function, not a product.
There is so much to talk about this as a solution, that I will just take my opportunity to honest congratulate you guys for an excellently well put together app and leave it at that.
- curious about plans for the future -
Very best of luck.
Stories for team (aka Group Stories) concept is awesome. Congratulations on your launch! I recently wrote a medium post about why Group stories is interesting (for Snapchat): https://artplusmarketing.com/ide....
@sriram_bhargav_karnati Thanks for the mention your wonderful post! Group stories are indeed interesting. If you haven't seen it yet you can check out our launch day story here: https://catch.team/s/GcLhJ1q_geK...
@sriram_bhargav_karnati Also, you should check out our post with our thoughts on the Stories model: https://medium.com/catch-blog/wh...
Thanks for posting Eric. Alfred and I have been working hard getting the Catch mobile apps to this point. We’re excited to get feedback from our friends on Product Hunt.
A little background on why we’re building Catch:
- We value extreme focus with our work but find most communication tools are interruption based. Chat notifications, text, phone calls, meetings being inserted into our schedules.
- We’re startup guys but have worked in a larger tech company after an acquisition and found that distributed offices, remote work, and dealing with timezones significantly reduces the amount of authentic communication hurting our team’s alignment, identity and culture.
- We’re inspired by innovations in consumer technology, in particular the stories format which keeps people connected with minimal friction or interruption.
We have big things planned but we’re excited to hear what you think about Catch so far and where you think we should go.
To give an example here's a shared page for our Launch Day story: https://catch.team/s/GcLhJ1q_geK...
@ryan_dewsbury congrats, guys! any plans on building integrations into other employee communication / project management platforms?
@shanndfox Nice talking with you today. I hope I answered your question in person. The answer is yes. We have plans on integrations. We currently have a simple Slack integration that will allow your team to be connected on Catch without any setup.
We're planning other integrations to help make richer stories. Your idea about getting catch into existing workflows makes a lot of sense.
I sent an update to our Launch Day story here:
https://catch.team/s/GcLhJ1q_geK...
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