Video transcript below:
My name is Nik Newark and I am the Imagen CTO. I am responsible for all product development within Imagen and the execution of our technical strategy. Most recently, I’ve been looking after the launch of Imagen Go, our new Software-as-a-Service product.
How can a product be so complex, yet appear to be so simple and intuitive for the end user?
Imagen makes very powerful and complex platforms designed to meet the needs of professional media clients who rely on the system day in and day out so with Imagen Go our challenge was to distil this power into something that meets the needs of professionals that don’t have time to learn a new system. It has got to be really simple from day one. We wanted to make a system that was as enjoyable to use as your phone so we interviewed a lot of customers to see where they spend their time. Many customers spend a lot of time tagging metadata. So we use advanced intelligence to characterise the tagging and indexing of all your documents. So all you need to do is to drag and drop your files into the Imagen interface.
What were the main challenges you faced when developing a new product remotely?
In 2021, software development is built using a number of platforms like Slack, Teams, Figma, Mirro and we rely upon all these tools for remote collaboration so we have actually been able to transition to work remotely quite easily and carried on without missing a beat. Imagen Go truly has been a product that, from inception through to delivery, has been built by remote teams for remote teams.
How were the key features of Imagen Go chosen?
Imagen has a couple of decades of experience building digital asset management solutions for a wide variety of different customers with vastly diverse needs but during that time we have identified some universal challenges shared by everyone and we wanted to make sure we got those absolutely right for Imagen Go. So we have concentrated on three areas. We do all the heavy lifting for you when you are initially uploading, ingesting your content. Secondly, we make it easy to find your content, and thirdly, we make it easy to collaborate on your content and share with your clients.
What future developments can we look forward to with Imagen Go?
So we’re at a really exciting point now, having just released the first version of the product, but we’ve got a huge roadmap full of lots of exciting features. We’re in a very lucky position, actually, because we’re building on the same platform that powers Imagen Pro. So there’s a lot of power and functionality that we can expose via the Go product and we’ll be doing so once we get that into the like shape so it can be consumable easily for everyone.
There are a couple of things I can share. So we want to make sure that Imagen Go will integrate with all of the other tools and systems you’re using and fit into existing workflows. So regardless of whether you are your editing something using Adobe Premiere or you want to post to social media or share a portfolio with clients, we want to make sure that we make this easier for you.
We also want to integrate with corporate and enterprise tools such as single-sign on solutions. So there is a lot of stuff coming down the track.
