Meet the team: interview with Seervision CPO Conrad von Grebel

Since co-founding the company with Nikos and Reto, I’m now leading the product team as CPO. I mainly focus on working with the team to plan the direction we want to take things and developing our product roadmap. Of course this involves a lot of coordination across teams, particularly business and development. We have two main products, the Seervision Suite and AIRD, so there’s a lot of work to be done to align them. The real focus at the moment is ensuring that our products don’t exist as separate entities, but that they still can serve their use cases and their users effectively. As long as we keep camera and workflow in mind as core principles, things will continue to evolve positively.

I really can’t start my day without a big can of coffee. After that I aim to work for a couple of hours on independent work so I can make some good progress on my projects. As I said we need to stay aligned across teams, and in my role as CPO I regularly check in with the product team to help them on anything that needs my input. Everyone at Seervision has a good level of autonomy and ownership of their work, so other than oversight and big picture planning I’m happy to give them their space. AIRD is also in its early stages, so it tends to need more hands-on engagement from me. It is fun though, I love getting to work on the project more directly.

We have a couple of upcoming customers that are a pretty big deal for me personally. Unfortunately I can’t mention any by name yet, but there is one in Switzerland that I am pretty proud of. I have a close relationship with them so it really hits a special place for me that we can put Seervision in their setup. It’s also an interesting project because they are not planning to use our autonomous tracking feature that much. This might sound counterintuitive for me to say as CPO, but the Seervision Suite has so much more to offer than just tracking. It’s really positive to have customers who see the big picture benefits of automated workflows and the smoothness and consistency that can be achieved through robotic operation.

I’m really driven by change, and not wanting to feel like we are standing still. When we were intensely working on R&D a couple of years ago there were quiet moments, but now we’re really moving again. The team is growing and we’re pushing towards building our customer base, with products that really work for them. It’s challenging but exciting to be pushing forward as much as we are now. We were really early in the industry in how we approached the problem for video production automation, and now we’re seeing it adopted across the industry which is positive. AIRD is also very different from the Seervision Suite, and it’s a real game-changer, as we’re trying to impact the way event production is run from end to end. The first signs have been very positive, so we know we’re moving in the right direction.

There’s a lot going on with companion software at the moment which is exciting. It’s not exactly a brand new concept but it’s great to see the industry picking these ideas up so fast now. There’s also a growing shift towards putting the stress of video production on pre-production rather than the live environment. It’s a shift that’s really needed in the industry and it’s super exciting for us to be a part of it. I may be CPO now, but my background is really in video production, so I’m glad to see the industry improving. When you’re live, you don’t have the time to deal with every little detail, so it’s far better to get set up more effectively in pre production. Helping to make that change in the industry is a really cool part of what we do.

Family is pretty much top of my list nowadays when I’m not in the office. I also like to horse ride, and you can often find me up in the Swiss mountains at the weekend. I used to play a lot of Jass (a classic swiss card game) but it’s getting harder and harder to get the old gang together now that most of us have kids and families.