BACK

Almabase Events

Alumni events are the most important engagement activities of any school or university and managing them is quite an arduous task for Alumni Officers.

We delighted our customers with an elegant and smooth experience of managing their events at scale.

Product Manager & Founding Designer

As Product Manager and Founding Designer, I gathered insights from the Customer Success team and had direct conversations with some of our most engaged customers. I worked closely with frontend and backend engineers to define the experience and support effective execution.

Scope to substantiate

  • Add the project timeline, team composition, and product stage.
  • Clarify which roadmap, prioritization, and launch decisions you owned versus influenced.
  • State why improving Events mattered to the business.

CUSTOMER & BUSINESS PROBLEM

Increasing complexity

The ‘events’ feature is a frequent go-to for so many of our partner schools. And over time, as we built more complex functionality like tickets, invites, attendee management, and payments – creating an event got complex and often confusing. We decided to fix that.

Problem evidence to add

  • Show the baseline through completion time, abandonment, support volume, or usability evidence.
  • Explain the business or retention risk of leaving this workflow unchanged.
  • Identify the primary customer segment for the redesign.

PRODUCT OPPORTUNITY

Continual improvement

Introducing a new and improved Events interface – a complete revamp of the event management functionality designed to give our users and their end users a smoother experience and additional flexibility.

DISCOVERY & CUSTOMER INSIGHTS

Learning from the customer

User research is not considered as one-off or one-time process but a continual observation, interaction with all stakeholders. We constantly interact with the customers as weekly customer calls, collect their feedback, track usage and also customers send requests on top of the existing features. Collating all the feedback we gain deep insights and behavioral patterns to build the product pipeline. After few conversations with Alumni Officers from multiple institutions and from some of the first-hand experiences at such events, we gathered sufficient insights into the Event Management Module.


Key Insights


- Alumni events are very different from regular events or any other organized meetups.

- Alumni are registered users of the alumni platform and there is a need to capture their engagement at every step. There are ticketed events, free events and a combination of both.

- Alumni can also donate or give gifts to a cause as part of the event registration flow.

- They can bring guests or family to such mega events which span for a few days.

- Alumni Officers manage these events with help of volunteers who manually check-in the attendees and coordination become often difficult.


Connect insight to product decisions

  • Add the number and type of institutions or participants involved.
  • For each major insight, show evidence → insight → decision → expected outcome.
  • Call out an assumption that changed because of customer evidence.

PRODUCT THESIS & SUCCESS CRITERIA

Create more events with ease

We believed Alumni Officers would create more events with less effort if the product made simple events fast to publish while progressively revealing tickets, payments, forms, agendas, and other advanced configuration. This direction balanced the common job with the flexibility institutions expected from the Event Management Module.

Complete the product thesis

  • State the hypothesis: if we simplify the common event flow, which customer and business outcomes should improve—and why?
  • Add the primary success metric and guardrails considered before design began.
  • Replace general research language here later with the decision the evidence enabled.

PRODUCT DIRECTION

An integrated event-management journey

We translated continual customer research and usage feedback into a connected product direction spanning event creation, ticketing, discounts, payments, registration, attendee management, volunteer check-in, and reporting. The goal was to improve the whole journey rather than optimize isolated screens.

PRODUCT STRATEGY & MVP SCOPE

Jobs to be done

We have drafted various scenarios for each step and treated them as Epic Stories. Our first priority was to aggressively narrow the scope of our project. By the numbers of features in control, we would have the time to work on multiple iterations.

Since our end users come from different walks of life and have different goals and objectives we practiced Jobs to be done framework and Nir Eyal’s Hooked methodology.
We mainly study how to direct the existing behaviors of users to a new expected behavior.



In this process, we need to have the idea about various factors like

1. Push – Seek a new efficient event management solution
2. Pull – Attract with new or auxiliary features
3. Habit – What do the users have to leave behind
4. Anxiety – Learning or new territory

Prioritization story to add

  • List what entered the MVP, what was deferred, and the decision criteria.
  • Show how customer coverage, frequency, feasibility, and time to value shaped scope.
  • Use the mega-event decision below as evidence of product judgment.

PRODUCT ECOSYSTEM & STAKEHOLDERS

Holistic view

Event Management Module


Events module of the Alumni Engagement Platform is one of the core modules. The others are Fundraising, Communication, and Mentorship. There are more features which strive to improve the alumni engagement and track them.
There are 4 Types of Users for the Events Module
1. Alumni Officer
2. Event Admin
3. Event Volunteers
4. Alumni / Guests



Information Structure


To put the whole Event Management Module into a structure is very important to scope the project well, plan development and release with shorter time cycles.



DESIGN WORKFLOWS

Frame each workflow as a product decision

  • Customer job and supporting evidence
  • Options considered and decision criteria
  • Trade-off made and how it supported the product thesis
  • How the decision was validated

Creating an event

I came up with sketches of how easily an Alumni Officer can create an event and at the same time give as much information to the alumni.

Steps Approach for event creation:
By splitting the event creation process into 4 steps in the decreasing order of priority. The first step will have all the mandatory fields, by which an event can be created quickly and published onto the site. This helps the Alumni Officers who need to create simple events without tickets or an elaborate agenda. The Second Step captures the Tickets, Discount, and Payment Gateway details, the third step Alumni Officers can acquire more information from the alumni by including forms. In the last step, they can give more details regarding the event like agenda, directions etc.


Event creation user flow




Event Creation Screen


Adding Tickets



Adding Tickets Screen




Adding Tickets Screen


Adding Discounts



Adding Discounts screen


Adding additional Description



Adding Description and Additional Settings screen




Linking a form for event registration




Adding Tickets and Discounts Screen




Adding Tickets and Discounts Screen


To maintain consistency in design and to have faster development we adopted a design standard, a react.js UI component library and migrated entire admin actions platform.

Event Listing



Event Listing Screen


Attendees listing



Attendees Listing screen


Alumni Registration

I also created sketches on paper for Event Registration where alumni select the tickets and pay for the event of how would they easily buy tickets, add extra amount as donation and checkout.



Even Registration mockup screen




Donating during Event Registration


Event Checkin

For event check-in, volunteers access a mobile device to search through the guests and mark them as checked-in.



Check-in User Flow


Event Reporting

Alumni Officers need to assimilate all the data and would often need lists of attendees so, that they can communicate later. I had to come up with concepts of a dashboard and tables.




Event Reporting dashboard


EXECUTION & DELIVERY CONSTRAINTS

Fine tuning

CSS Edits


Due to the packed schedule and time constraints, I don’t spend more time on the style guide for the visual design rather work on the CSS edits to the crude working product. I inspect CSS elements, edit changes to my visual guidelines and share the CSS document with respective ‘divs’ and attributes to the frontend developer.




Wireframes for Check-in Screen




Landing, Check-in and Attendees Screen




Tickets and Discount Screen


QUALITY & LAUNCH READINESS

Ensuring quality

Testing and Bug Bash


After the module is deployed, I spend 1-2 days testing the functionality as per test scenarios and record the issues on Asana ( project management tool ). Which the developer fixes in the next 1-2 days.

During this phase, I tested all the corner cases, empty case scenarios and usually correct the messaging, copy, tooltips, information pullouts, modal dialogues etc.

After we are confident, we invite the whole team to except the team responsible for the Event Module, tested for an hour and reported the issues.

The frontend and backend developers spent 2 days to fix all the bugs and prepared the feature for production launch.


Sample CSS Code

Execution evidence to add

  • Add milestones, dependencies, the most important delivery risk, and your role in resolving it.
  • Describe one difficult cross-functional decision and how you influenced the outcome.
  • State the launch-readiness criteria used by the team.

LAUNCH & ROLLOUT

Delivering the product

Launch Plan and Release


In the case of Event Management Module, as part of the launch plan wrote change log, relevant blog articles and product update emails and share it with the Customer Success team. They shared the material, published the blog and developers released the feature.







Product blogs on Event Feature

THE IMPACT

Metrics and Feedback

User Testing and Analytics


We have Smartlook account set up for each customer and we would constantly check the user activity for next 1 week. Smartlook would give the actual video recording of the user’s activity.

We observe the user journey and take note of any interactions that users are finding hard to accomplish their goal.

We fixed date range picker after finding that our customers are struggling to select Start and End Date and Time of an Event across different Time Zones.

We introduced ‘To Be Declared’ for future events, as they couldn’t create events without date and time ( mandatory fields ).

To track the usage of alumni, we setup UTM tags and track over Google Analytics.

Impact evidence to add

  • Add event-creation completion, time to publish, adoption, repeat usage, registration volume, or support-ticket change.
  • Use qualitative customer evidence when exact metrics cannot be disclosed.
  • State the measurement period and distinguish team outcomes from your contribution.

TRADE-OFFS, LEARNINGS & NEXT BETS

What I’ve learned

This project made me appreciate the importance of understanding our user’s needs and their jobs to be done. There are certain specific functionalities that Alumni Officers would need, even though they are not contemporary.

We should take care not to bloat the product with more features rather improve the functionality for a higher frequency of usage. Often “Less is More”.

We were not able to accommodate certain requests from big universities which organize Mega Events ( Multi-day Simultaneous Events ) which offer tickets for family and guests who can attend events independently. This we deliberately scoped out because it would be difficult to achieve simplicity and be relevant to a majority of our customers. This can be considered one trade-off of a B2B SaaS Platform.

Also, a perfect scenario can be achieved by complicating the design. For example, matching tickets with the number of guests, which decreases the Check-in time at the venue, however, it will increase the friction for alumni while buying tickets as they have to enter a lot of details. There are certain trade-offs but often alumni experience needs to be given the priority.


Complete the reflection

  • Explain what evidence would justify revisiting mega-event support.
  • Describe what you would do differently with what you now know.
  • Define the next smallest experiment that could test the opportunity without bloating the core workflow.