Situation
Planning events takes time - chasing attendees, finding accommodation, planning your schedule. Supporting their procurement-as-a-service strategy, I led the delivery of Impala's Events product. A tool and service that supported businesses in the procurement of competitive hotel rates, as well as the admin of inviting and managing attendees.
Initially tightly coupled to Impala's procurement service, I delivered the first version of a self-serve events product. This involved taking the existing app I'd been working on, and re-architecting it to work in a completely hands-off way.
Task
Our goal was to deliver an entirely self-serve version of Impala Events. This supported Impala's procurement strategy by acting as a gateway for companies to use our services. By signing up for a light-touch service like events, we could later convert them to the more involved procurement process.
We knew our existing events product served a key problem for businesses, but that by being tightly coupled to the service there was a barrier to entry.
My task was to understand what changes we needed to make to our existing product, understand the pricing model and positioning, and handle the design and front-end build.
Action
The first step was mapping the manual processes that our back-office team went through to setup hotel rates and rooming lists. By creating a service map showing the different interactions we had a clear artefact that the team could refer back to for both design and engineering decisions.
From here I sat down with my engineering team and we planned our roadmap of changes, setting a clear idea of what our first and later versions should look like including any trade-offs. This helped inform discussions with senior leadership and the sales team about what the product would initially do, and what it wouldn't.
Using research from our existing customers, we identified key problems that people encountered during event creation, including; getting attendee information, communicating hotel assignments, and keeping events on budget.
We discarded features like themeing and customisation, as they didn't solve the core problem of event planning.
Onboarding & signup
Our research had showed that our target audience used a lot of free off-the-shelf tools to plan their events - eg. Google Sheets/ Forms. I designed the pricing structure and sign-up experience to reduce barriers to sign-up, offering a free tier with a restriction on the maximum number of attendees. The goal was to maximise the number of free users with smaller events, proving the benefit of the product and converting them for their larger events.
Result
By focussing on a very specific feature-set we were able to release on time, with a product that supported our key user journeys.
Without putting any marketing spend behind the product we saw several unattended sign-ups, with companies able to create their events quickly and easily.
Feedback from our users was positive, with specific feedback about the ease of use for the service and product. We supported a key partner in their planning of a 2,000 person event.