If you're in Learning & Development, technical writing, customer education, or customer success, you’ve probably felt the pain of creating software demo or explainer videos for different audiences.
There are two really hard challenges when it comes to producing valuable videos - even IF your product isn’t changing every other week (LMAO.)
This scenario may sound familiar: you ask your SMEs like your Product Manager or engineering team, or pre-sales engineer to record demos using tools like Zoom, Loom, or Vidyard.
A big challenge is getting them to do that at all.
“Uncooperative SME’s would be the hardest problem to overcome. You need to be very good at drawing information from reluctant and busy people,” said Mike Cooper, a technical writer on Quora. But let’s say you do get it in a week or two.
Then you and/or your team spends hours—sometimes days—editing or even totally redoing these videos in software like Camtasia or Adobe. It's tedious, frustrating, and honestly feels like wasted time…because the product is going to change in 2 weeks.
One technical writer summed it up perfectly: "We spend way too much time turning raw SME videos into something usable. And as soon as something in the software changes, we’re back to square one."
One piece of advice from Shyamanta Baruah “Gain (and show) Respect: Gaining respect is the most important thing while working with an SME. True, you can’t become an expert on every subject. However, nothing is stopping you from getting an overview of the subject in hand. If you walk in clueless, it shows that you are not serious about your work, and in a way you don’t respect the work the SME is doing.”
You should definitely make progress on knowing your product. But the real issue? SMEs know the software inside-out, but they aren't video producers. And the process as it works today is too lengthy to keep up with your product changes.
Meanwhile, your content creators and instructional designers are video experts—but they don't have that deep software knowledge.
Perhaps you know the basics of how to click around, but doing it smoothly takes practice…and time.
You have to constantly switch between checking the scripts and recording actions. One user said, "Having to jump between scripting and recording was always annoying.”
But the product and engineering teams push back. “The technical enablement and collateral for supporting the mid to late stage of the sales funnel should be owned by outbound product or technical marketing.”
This mismatch means endless back-and-forth, wasted hours, and delays.
An L&D professional recently shared, "Our SMEs can show how things work, but they're not video creators. So we end up spending tons of extra hours fixing everything they give us. It slows everything down."
So, the cycle continues.
Here’s how Videate can help BOTH these situations:
"Videate makes communication between SMEs, product managers, and designers simple. Our PMs create a script and draft video, SMEs view the video and point out inaccuracies, PMs revise, Designers add further design elements and branding, Editor revises script, PM makes final changes.."
Less wasted effort: Videos update automatically, so your team doesn’t have to redo them every time the software changes.