ZEISS Secacam — case study

01 / My role

What I actually own.

// product owner, mobile & web

I joined the Secacam team as a designer in 2023, grew into a Proxy Product Owner, and took the official Product Owner role for the mobile and web app in 2024. The job sits between hunters in the field, engineers across two platforms, and the hardware and business stakeholders who all need the same release to land.

Own the roadmap for the mobile and web app — what ships, in what order, and what we deliberately do not build.
Lead frontend teams across React Native and Next.js, from refinement through release.
Run discovery with hunters, then turn it into specs engineers can build from without a translation layer.
Align engineering, hardware and business stakeholders so the app and the camera ship as one product.
Own localisation across twenty languages, including the German and English source copy.
Keep a live product healthy at 200,000+ downloads while new AI features land on top of it.

Stack & tools

React NativeNext.jsTypeScriptFigmaSCRUMJIRAConfluence

The team shape

Cross-functional and cross-border: frontend on mobile and web, backend and cloud, hardware and firmware, plus design and business. My job is to keep one roadmap legible to all of them.

02 / The app

Seven screens, one product.

// swipe, or use the arrows

App Store screenshot: camera overview showing the service plan, remaining transmissions and a grid of subscribed cameras. Headline on the image (English): “Manage & operate your cameras”. — Every camera, its status and its plan on one screen.

App Store screenshot: remote camera settings for sensitivity, flash mode, photo size and video recording. Headline on the image (English): “Change your camera settings remotely”. — Capture, photo and video settings changed without leaving the house.

App Store screenshot: photo gallery grouped by date with an active “Animal & Object” filter and detection boxes on the thumbnails. Headline on the image (English): “Filter based on Animals”. — The AI filters a full gallery down to the species you care about.

App Store screenshot: in-app video player showing two deer at night, with download, share and favourite actions. Headline on the image (English): “Videos directly in your app”. — Full HD video streamed straight into the app.

App Store screenshot: a colourised night capture of a deer with an AI detection box around it. Headline on the image (English): “Animal Recognition & Color the Night”. — Color the Night turns a greyscale infrared shot into a lifelike night image.

App Store screenshot: satellite map view showing the camera’s attachment location with an “Open in Maps” button. Headline on the image (English): “Track your camera”. — SecaTrack reports the camera’s GPS position every ten minutes.

App Store screenshot: the same photo gallery rendered in dark mode. Headline on the image (English): “Darkmode available & in 20 Languages”. — Dark mode, and twenty languages.

03 / Features

What the app can do.

// nine capabilities across four service tiers

AI

Animal recognition

A deep-learning model classifies the species in a capture within seconds, reading size, shape and fur colour. It was trained on images from real hunting locations, annotated by hunters themselves, and it is retrained continuously as new imagery arrives — so it holds up on night-vision shots and on animals half-hidden behind a bush. That classification is what makes a gallery of thousands of captures filterable at all. Inference runs on ZEISS’s own EU cloud infrastructure, GDPR-compliant.

Patent pending

Color the Night

Infrared night captures are greyscale, and the eye reads a greyscale frame measurably slower than a coloured one. So the camera takes a daytime reference photo of the same spot, which becomes a colour palette for the AI; at night that palette is mapped onto the monochrome infrared frame to produce a lifelike night image. It degrades gracefully by design — a brand-new camera site, fresh snow or heavy rain means the reference is stale, and the result stays cautious until it catches up. Included with the Professional package.

Data

Activity Center

Every sighting becomes data. Species, time and location are logged per territory and turned into population and distribution views, activity patterns and best time windows — weighted by weather, hunting pressure and moon phase — plus the hotspots and feeding areas where something actually happens.

Basic and up

SecaTrack GPS

Cameras left in the forest get stolen. SecaTrack reports the camera’s coordinates every ten minutes, so a missing camera is a point on a map rather than a write-off.

All plans

Remote status & settings

Battery, signal and storage at a glance, plus full capture, photo and video settings changed from the app — sensitivity, flash mode, image size, video length. No drive out to the camera to change one value.

Premium and up

Gallery, filters & albums

Photos and videos organised by camera and by date, filtered by detected animal or object, and grouped into custom albums by location or setup. Video transmission runs from the Basic plan upward; on prepaid it costs four credits per video.

Basic and up

Sharing & roles

Camera access shared with friends, family or a hunting party, with viewer and operator roles — so not everyone who can look can also change settings. Multi-camera management comes with a 30% discount from four cameras up.

Craft

Dark mode & 20 languages

A dark theme that genuinely fits the use case: this app gets opened before dawn and after dusk. Localised into twenty languages, which shapes every layout decision we make.

All plans

Instant notifications

A push lands the moment a camera triggers, with the capture attached. For most users this is the product — they rarely open the app cold, they open it from a notification.

04 / On camera

Talking about the product.

// expert talk · brand film · short

I drove this one

Expert Talk: unlocking AI power with the ZEISS Secacam app

A panel walking through what the AI in Secacam actually does — animal recognition, Color the Night and the Activity Center — and why it matters in the field. I played a major role in this one, from shaping the content to being on camera.

Digital tools in hunting: how ZEISS technology is shaping wildlife conservation

The wider picture: how connected cameras and the data they produce feed into wildlife management and conservation, not just hunting.

Triggered — Secacam in one notification

A short on the moment the whole product hangs on: a camera fires, and the capture is on your phone seconds later.

Nothing loads from YouTube until you press play — and then only from youtube-nocookie.com.

05 / Sources

The app with 200,000+ downloads.