Organizations
Bringing together scientific associations' events and data into a cohesive, shared workspace.
Company
Fourwaves' mission is to provide an all-in-one conference management platform for academics and scientists around the world to meet and share the fruit of their research.
Context & Business Goals
At this point, we were looking at meeting a number of additional needs of scientific associations, such as membership & publication management, as well as provide a storefront for all their activities.
But to move confidently in that direction, we first had to address a pressing issue : the lack of a centralized hub where all events, users and activities linked to an association could be found.
The Problems
Disconnected Users & Permissions
Users (organizers, participants, reviewers, etc.) from the same association had no ways of connecting together outside of a particular event settings.
Siloed Events
Events organized from differents users within the same association were not linked together in any way.
Data Gaps
Internally, we had no clear idea how many clients we had, how many events they organized every year, the plans and features they used, etc.
Churn
There was nothing locking our users in once an event was over — and the platform was not exactly a Ux jewel back then.
The Objectives
Introduce & leverage the concept of Organizations to enable our clients to recreate the structure of their associations within the app. By doing so, we would also address our own internal lack of insights, as well as build better stickiness.
My Role + The Team
I was entirely responsible for the Ux/Ui of the feature, as well as a good portion of product management (defining the scope, gathering requirements, formulating and validating business goals, etc.) in collaboration with Matt, our CEO.
Concepts were validated and later implemented by Gabriel, our CTO and principal backend engineer, along with a team of 3 frontends.
Hypothesis
I woke up one Monday morning to an email from Matt, the CEO, saying he'd drafted the main components of his vision of Organizations :
All events would be linked to an Organization, which could be created and set up by any user of the platform.
All Organizations would be on yearly subscription plans — starting with Free, and each plan would offer unlimited events. So no more single-event pricing.
Subscription plans could be enhanced with a number of add-ons, applied per event.
Add-on modules and plans (with the exception of Pro) would be available for self-serve purchase directly from within the application. As a product that relied very heavily on sales reps, demos and support, that meant we really had to get into the product-led train and adjust accordingly.
The rationale behind this was that it would naturally increase the sheer number of events on our platform, thus the number of participants, that could in turn become organizers and host their own events. Word-of-mouth and cross-reference was always a very strong conversation factor for us, so it made some sense. And since we collected transaction fees on all events, it would automatically boost our ARR without much effort.
Validation → Survey
Still, that was a bold plan. I had questions. Matt's new pricing model initially assumed that we would charge roughly the same price as we did for a single event, but applied to a subscription with unlimited events. This also implied that scientific associations had a secret stash of other events that they presently didn't host on Fourwaves. I proposed that we tested the waters by sending a simple survey. I divided it into 3 main sections that each had their purpose.
From the response pool, I wanted to draw out the clients that had been using Fourwaves for at least a little while, and that were rather happy with the platform and its current offer.
Among those potentially loyal clients, how many really had a significant number of other events that they didn't currently host on Fourwaves, and if so, why not?
And finally, did they find the idea of a yearly subscription with unlimited events appealing, and what was they price range for that new offer?
Results
The survey was sent in English and French to 389 event organizers, and we collected close to 100 answers in the span of two weeks. I had hoped that the results would provide us with a clear definition of where we should head, but the reality was a bit more complicated. Still, it gave us confidence and lots of precious information.
From the response pool, 64% had been with Fourwaves less than 2 two years, so they might not feel as attached to the platform as long-standing ones. Among those, thought, the average score for happiness with the platform stood at 7.2 / 10.
The most popular plans were Essentials and Advanced at around 30% each, which gave a average budget of about 1250$ per event.
Where it got tricky, was that 45% of responders said they didn't organize all their events with Fourwaves, but they also didn't a platform for those other (smaller) events. Also, the average number of events that they organized each year was 3.6, but the range went from less than one to 40, 50 and even 65 in some cases 🤯.
The question on the appeal of a yearly subscription fee with unlimited events got an average score of 6.8 / 10. Which wasn't bad, but it was hard to interpret. Would those clients leave in case of a business model change? If so, were we ok with that, and to what extend?
And finally, after compiling results from the questions on pricing and cross-checking them with current plan trends, we established that the average budget for a yearly subscription would be somewhere around 1900 - 2000$.
The Groundwork - To Each his Own
The structure of scientific events and associations is strikingly similar from one to the next. They are made up of academics in a given field of expertise, who are in turn organizers, peer-reviewers or participants in events of all sizes — annual conferences, workshops, symposia, panels, etc.
A few months before we started on this project, I had addressed one important issue : the "user dashboard" contained a mishmash of everything and anything, without consideration for the fact that different roles meant different display needs.
From this ⬆️, we moved on to this ⬇️, with a few other Ux and Ui adjustments that have taken place in other projects. A few things bothered me, especially the fact that the organizer's dashboard was kind of floating around instead of being located within an organization, but it was a good start and that could be changed later on.
Roles & Permissions
I knew from my experience working Poka that user roles & permissions can make or break a product. They must strike that delicate balance between too many and too little, while working together seamlessly.
We had only two event-organizing roles : Event Admins and Program Chairs, and it made sense as we had event-based admins only. But now we were adding a whole new layer of admins on organizations, and we had to carefully reflect on how the legacy would be handled, as well as implications on pricing and availability per plan.
I drafted the following table to begin with. We went back and forth over it, presented it to a few clients. Matt was adamant that Event Admins & Program Chair (aka Event Committees) would become a premium feature of the Pro plan only.
In the end, we decided to remove the Organisation Admins, and to increase the number of Super Admins to 3 in the Advanced plan. We kept the new Event Viewer role mainly as a way to facilitate the migration of legacy events, since their Event Committees would be removed from most plans. It was also a request that kept coming back quite often among our clients : they wanted to provide visibility to some parts of their event, like the program, floor plan or sponsors, but they didn't want to give full edit rights to everyone.
Fixing Ungated Features
Another issue that truly made my skin crawl, was the fact that no matter what plan your event was on, you had access right from the start to all the features, and there were no indications of which features belonged to which plan. So you would build you event, and upon publishing it, you would enter a license code linked to the plan you had initially purchased, and everything that wasn't included in that plan vanished before your very eyes. Needless to say, we had countless support emails from panicked clients, wondering what had happened to their work, and having to upgrade plans unexpectedly to get it back.
Obviously, in order to build trust and reliability, I worked on gating features according to plans, while working on copywriting and button placement to try and instigate upgrade fever.
Self-Serve Checkout
I then concentrated on the self-checkout flow of plans and add-ons, which was pretty straight-forwards. We already had a full-page modale component that could be used for that, with a great multi-step flow.
Curve Ball
That's when, on another Monday morning a few weeks down the road, Matt said he'd had another epiphany over the weekend.
Long story short, he'd decided that it was too risky a move to completely change our business model, and that he wanted to keep the whole single-event pricing, on top of yearly subscriptions. Plus add-ons per event. And also, support packages, because our COO wanted to start billing support services separately.
Again, I had a lot of questions, and to be honest, a lot of reservations.
Event-based pricing made Organizations quite useless, and it would be a real shame to lose the momentum on this.
This was way too many options to choose from, in a self-serve model, and that our strategy to go product-led could seriously suffer from it.
It would take away from our credibility, and make us vulnerable from all the different use cases we'd have to (try to) handle elegantly
I also tried to pintpoint where this lack of confidence came from, and risked a few hypothesis.
It still wasn't clear what our target market was, and we were trying to make our pricing fit everyone, from NGOs that have zero budget, all the way to private associations that had a budget of $50K-100K for their annual gathering.
I felt that the composition of each plan wasn't yet on point. It was hard to truly tell the difference in value from one to the other.
Subscriptions, Event Upgrade, Add-Ons, Support Packages
Still, it was decided that we keep moving forwards. Which meant I had to rethink the whole checkout flow of plans, subscriptions, add-ons and support packages. It quickly became obvious that everything put together in the same checkout flow, from every upgrade point, was overwhelming and didn't make sense anyways.
I toyed a bit with the concepts, then decided that event upgrades and add-ons would be available from purchase only from within the event organizing panel, while yearly subscriptions and support plans would be located in the organization dashboard, under Plans & Billing
Last but not least, Matt wanted us, under the Fourwaves Super Admin role, to be able to get into a client's interface and build a highly customizable plan.
The Master Plan
As we moved along with exploration and design, I tried to figure out how we would roll out this big undertaking. In the end, I divided into 4 phases :
Overhaul of the Organization dashboard : it "existed", but was rather lackluster compared to the rest of the application, and still full of legacy code. We were going to give it a refreshed menu and layout, and adjust the sections so that it would be up to speed when it became the focal point for everything to do with event organization.
Introduction to Organizations : we would (gently) force the creation of Organizations by event organizers, and encourage them to import their orphan events into it, as well as invite their colleagues to join.
Gating of features, introduction of new plans, and self-serve upgrades.
Full rollout : all orphan legacy events would become unavailable, and event organization would be removed from the user dashboard to take place only from within Organizations.
Takeaways
Phase 1 & 2 have been completed, and we are currently refining Phase 3 for development purposes. It's going really well so far, despite all the twists and turns I experienced during analysis and design.
I'm still very unsure about Event Upgrades. I'm starting to think of ways we can eventually pull the plug on this, and the sort of metrics that will Matt confortable with going all in on yearly subscriptions.
I already proposed a few strategies to boost self-serve discovery and purchases, as I feel we could be providing better guidance within our platform with items like checklist, hints, tooltips, contextual app, mini product tours, etc.
I strongly believe we still have a lot of work to do on better defining the components on each plan.
To be continued!