Why we built our own call recorder
Why we built our own call recorder
Raphael Fleckenstein
Co-founder & CEO
Oct 26, 2023
3m
At Productlane, we believe heavily in talking with our customers.
It’s more meaningful than written feedback because it clearly shows you that real people are using your product, and it makes you realize that you are responsible for how that human feels when using it. You can see emotions and get many more details of the problems you can solve for them.
Unfortunately, these moments are very difficult to share with your team.
Recording those conversations is the way to go, but unfortunately, going through the recording and sharing important moments with a transcript is way too much work. User researchers spend 2-3 hours per 1 hour recording to process insights and share those clips with their team. This is not feasible for PMs or designers who have many other things to do.
Current call recorders are trying to solve it with AI Summaries, which turn out largely inaccurate and miss context. It‘s very hard for an AI to define which moment is worth highlighting.
The Solution
After months of iterating, we found the solution is much simpler than AI summaries. Plain, old notes that you take during an interview. But better than that: With timestamps, so every line in a note has a little play button that leads to the exact second when a person talked about a thing.
We still show a transcript that you can go through if the recording is super dense, but the whole magic will happen in your notes. This was not doable in any other call recorder we tested. If they had timestamped notes, they weren’t enjoyable and hard to find. So we built our own.
Process insights faster
The time to process an interview now went down from 2-3 hours to 5 minutes. Just go through your note on Productlane and connect any problem, observation or feature idea with Linear issues and projects.
User researchers who like to highlight more things, like customer activities, goals, emotions, and more, can also use our „Tags“ that we built for that. We actually want to dig into that more in the future to improve them and turn Productlane into an even more powerful space for user research.
All context is now in Linear
What's more, since Productlane is fully connected with Linear, you'll easily be able to spread what was said in your calls. If you link timestamped notes with Linear, you will get everybody in the company to easily watch it in context and get aligned on the roadmap. Every highlight from a call will add a link to the Linear issue, and engineers can watch it when they work on it.
How that fits into our vision
Our vision is to help companies build truly simple and high-quality software. By building an insights hub around your issue tracker with three major features:
Feedback hub: Connect feedback with feature ideas and opportunities in your issue tracker. Based on customer segments and feature criticality, the right things will rise to the top over time.
Portal: We made that a lot easier with our customer portal, where you can make Linear projects and issues public for your users to get more feedback.
Video: Now, with our 3rd major feature, you can connect the highest quality feedback with Linear and make the right second of a call recording visible for your engineers.
To align everyone in your team around the user and build truly great products.
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