From sippy cups to bottles, if it can hold water, Trove Brands has designed and manufactured products for it under a couple different household names, including Owala, which I saw the other day at Target.
Garrett, who heads their video production team, reached out about having his team join the Kinopio Teams Pilot program, mentioned in bulletin email № 38. Trove is a huge multinational corporation with teams inside of teams, like legal, sales, and logistics. Kinopio helps the team work within that larger system and turn briefs into projects, and manage production pipelines.
Briefs come from brand marketing which are then directed and shot, after that videos come to the team for editing. The larger company uses enterprise project management software (ClickUp). The problem is that ClickUp is visually complex and hard to follow - so their PM takes that info and organizes it into spaces the team can work off of.
For Video Production Workflows
The editing team creates Kinopio spaces for a variety of jobs.
Project Assignment spaces are used to track who’s working on what this month. Each person gets a box with all their deliverables and due dates to give everyone transparency and a real sense of progress and accomplishment.
Pro Tip: Todos, cards @assigned to you, and @due dates can be tracked across all spaces in the sidebar, so it's easy to get an overview of what needs doing.
Project Overview spaces group upcoming (‘on air’) projects with the assets required for each one. Moodboards and design references are also created near each project, bringing together creativity and productivity. These deliverables are translated from csv files they receive. Kinopio helps make sure nothing slips through the cracks.
Storyboarding spaces are used to outline the sequence of event footage that will be assembled into the final video deliverable.
Tracking work in the same place where you develop your ideas and inspiration helps keep everyone on the same page, and saves time explaining results later on.
And of course they put all these spaces inside groups so that everything is easy to find, and everyone on the team is automatically able to collaborate.
When working with freelancers, it’s really helpful to have spaces that serve as the source of truth, containing all the references, up to date assets (e.g. reference photos, music, videos, design files), the approved copy they’ll need for a project, and small notes like how to light the product.
More Visible Projects Make More Effective Teams
After the pilot program the team reported that using Kinopio likely “increased project visibility by 80%” (definitely a day/night improvement), and that Kinopio easily “saved the team 8 hours a month in searching for current and future assignments”.
At the end of the day, improving project visibility made the team more effective. This meant that they could work more effectively, didn't have projects get lost, and helped them look ahead to properly allocate resources.
Based on their experience in the pilot program, the team at Trove chose to upgrade everyone on the team to paid accounts.
Even though my work experience was in software development and not video production, managing projects in a way that keeps everyone aligned is the kind of universal problem that Kinopio was designed for. Fun and easy to use tools can also be powerful enough for the workplace, and provide major productivity advantages to the businesses that employ them.
If you’d like to join the Team Pilot Program, there are a few slots open so feel free to reach out to me directly at hi@kinopio.club.
Stay hydrated friends.