Managed Events

TEAM

Product Manager, Senior Designer (me), Dev Lead

METHODOLOGIES

Generative: Discovery User Interviews,
Evaluative: Usability Testing, Journey Mapping

TIMELINE

8 months for MVP, continuous enhancements since 2022

CHALLENGE

While templates were great for setting the stage for users in an account, Calendly admins wanted to be able to assign them in bulk to their users and be able to update event type fields in bulk.

Problem Statement

As the team lead who manages my team's scheduling process, I need to make sure all of our customer-facing materials are consistent and on brand. The team lead's goal is also to streamline the scheduling process so that there's less time scheduling or more time spent on effective meetings. While templates were easy to assign when inviting users into a Calendly account, after that point, it's very difficult to manage those templates since users are free to change every aspect of it.

Research

While our templates feature was appearing to be useful for our admins, we had gotten feedback through several channels that signaled that we needed to enhance it.

We dug into Templates. We started internally with our Customer Success Managers who were in charge of managing large accounts. I conducted a journey mapping exercise to identify where the journey there was friction and pain points. Working with my Product Manager, we identified opportunities for user interviews to then shape solution exploration.

We conducted user interviews internally and externally

3 end users, 3 Customer Success Managers who support larger customers (300+ seat count)
30 minutes each
Recruited through identifying customers already using the Templates feature

Key Findings

Validated connection between a 'template" and it's child event types as a way to "bulk edit" or update the template
Current workaround: editing templates, then re-assigning to everyone one by one
Need templates for collective and round robin (currently only for 1-1 and group event types)

Still to answer

naming: templates, admin managed event types, managed events?
validate if/how a template will be assigned to a group

Synthesize

Several themes emerged from our calls that would inform our MVP:

bulk updates for consistency in our customer's customer's experience
bulk assignment and a better way for admins to see who has which event type
a way to lock down certain fields so that users can't change them

Journey Map

Through all the interviews, we learned that templates were just one part of a user's journey as the onboard as a new company and expand by adding more seats. I created a journey map to capture each step, the sentiment behind them, and areas of opportunity. This artifact was circulated as a way to give peers an understanding of what larger customers face when setting up and using Calendly.

Initial Designs

Initial designs included building on top of our existing event type editor, questions about where managed events should be, and if they should co-exist alongside templates. This opened up questions around our existing information architecture and if it could support scale. While these were became aware of these problems, we had to de-risk as much as possible. In collaboration with PM and Engineering, we decided to:

Build managed events in the same Admin Managed sections where Templates already lived
Create a new experience for Managed Events, including an Assign tab where an admin can see all the users or groups that have been assigned a Managed Event
Start creating a plan to sunset Templates with Product Marketing and Engineering

Usability Test

We built a light prototype to test with potential beta customers. These customers were identified through our Customer Success Managers and were part of previous interviews. We built a prototype to test with our users. Main points of feedback:

lock all fields in each section
admins need to be able to more efficiently assign to a group of users.. otherwise it's cumbersome to repeatedly type each user's name

While we intended that all fields would be locked, we ran into technical constraints with locking the location field. Ideally, admins want to set a location (ex: Zoom) and have that as the default and locked location for this managed event to prevent them from using a non-company sanctioned integration. However, due to the complexity of event type code, we weren't able to scope this for our MVP.

The tradeoff: if Zoom is selected, it will populate. Once users connect their Calendly account to Zoom, a link will auto-generate with every meeting booked.The mechanism for searching and selecting users to assign this managed event is cumbersome. For an MVP we decided to use this pre-existing pattern and focus on assigning managed events to groups (a feature in Calendly) as a post-GA enhancement.

Deliver

After going through testing and aligning strategies with with Core (FTUX, end user focused squads) we decided to migrate the Templates feature to Managed Events, with its parent-child relationship and a locking mechanism. As the designs became more refined, I collaborated with Product Marketing, Engineering, and Design to craft a change management journey as the business decided to sunset Templates after the release (Alpha, Beta, GA) of Managed Events.

Empty and Upgrade

List and edit pages

NEXT STEPS

Create dev-ready designs

SUBSEQUENT PROJECTS

Discovery User Interviews, Usability Testing, Journey Mapping

CONTINUED LEARNING

To this day, we are doing A/B testing on the name and discovery of Managed Events. Latest A/B test revealed finding event types wasn't an issue but rather creeating one and using one is the barrier.