Lauren Chan Lee is Chief Product Officer at Leap Event Technology, an all-in-one event technology solution that enables organizers to transform their events into electrifying experiences for attendees. Over her career, Lauren has worked on almost every product area — from frontend to backend, desktop to mobile apps, buyer to seller, and event discovery to trust and safety. She’s worked for companies such as Microsoft, StubHub, and Care.com, and has taken that expertise to build a consulting practice and share her learnings as an interim product executive, advisor, and speaker. After advising Leap on several projects, she joined the team in late 2022.
In our conversation, Lauren talks about key pain points in live event technology management, including timing and spikes in web traffic, and how she mitigates them. She shares a time when her team leveraged in-person observations at New York Comic Con to make improvements to the existing product, as well as how they applied B2B app features to their B2C business.
Most of the time, the customer and the end user are aligned, but every so often, there’s something that would be good for the end customer but not as good for the client, or vice versa. Generally, the right thing to do is what is best for the end customers, so I have to sell our clients on that and how it helps the business in the long term.
It takes a trusted relationship to successfully convince the client that you have their best interests in mind and that what’s best for their customer is going to be best for them. That’s not something that you can build overnight. You have to invest in that relationship and build it. Then, hopefully, when that type of situation presents itself, you’re able to have that strong rapport to influence them.
The biggest technique I’ve taken from my previous experiences has to do with communicating company strategy. Something I’d heard internally when I first joined Leap was that folks didn’t always know what the product strategies were.
To mitigate that, we now do a readout to the entire company — going through our annual strategic planning process to set the budget and overall company strategy. The idea is to review the big picture and all of the accompanying items clearly, at the beginning of the year, and explain how they trickle down to each of the product lines.
To complement that, we also reinforce this process quarterly. We look at what we’ve accomplished over the past quarter and discuss plans for the upcoming quarter, including any problems we’re facing, things we need help with, key decisions we need input on, etc. We’ve put a forum in place to have those important discussions.
The final piece is that we have an all-hands meeting every month. As part of that meeting, there’s a product update where we share some of the things that have been released over the past month and who to talk to if you’d like to learn more. With all of these checkpoints in place, I also make sure that each product team is constantly having conversations with their own stakeholders and customers.
When I think about what really makes live events unique, there are two main components. One is that there are hard deadlines in place because each event has a specific date and time. Sometimes, in a product development process, things get delayed, but the timing of an event is one factor that you can’t change. You have to get creative with the other factors that you can control, like resources and scope, and really hone in on the minimum experience needed to deliver value to your clients and customers.
The other component is that traffic can spike dramatically. For example, if a company is hosting a really popular event, the site is going to experience a ton of traffic when tickets go on sale. The same thing happens when you’re trying to physically enter an event too, such as attending an MLB game when you have to wait in line to go through security, scan your ticket, and find your seats in the stadium.
In the case of a huge online spike, like in the ticketing example, we can mitigate this by having queues in place. This is pretty common on sites nowadays. People wait in a digital queue, and then we let in an appropriate amount of traffic over time. That way, not everyone hits the site at the same time, causing it to crash. I think we’ve all experienced that before and it’s so frustrating.
In general, understanding when you need to scale and how you need to prepare takes a lot of forward-thinking and anticipating. Since one of the types of products that we offer is ticketing, we also have that access control piece. When we’re talking about the physical aspect of attending an event, our goal is to get people in the door quickly. That directly translates to our products and on-site operations, such as the type of scanners that we deploy and how many access control points we set up. We partner with our clients — the event organizers — to come up with the best plan for attendees.
It’s super important to incorporate feedback throughout the product life cycle. For example, we have a solution that focuses on the patron management vertical (e.g., nonprofits, fine arts, and performing arts). At any time, patron management clients can come to the portal, submit their ideas, vote on others’ ideas, etc. This is a really important way for our team to get signals on what’s important to our users.
Our team looks at every single one of those requests and decides how to prioritize them. Then, we’ll loop back after the release and let the users know what was changed. All of our users have a voice — not just our biggest or loudest customers.
At fandom conventions, there’s a large show floor with different vendors and exhibitors who might be selling things like costumes, comic books, or even lightsabers. For a lot of those vendors, it’s really important to collect leads. They want to know who’s coming by their booth and is interested in their products so they can build up their email list.
For vendors specifically, we offer a tool that looks like a phone. As each booth visitor comes up, they can scan their badge, which automatically enters them into a contest to win a prize. On the flip side, the vendor gets information about the person who stopped by.
One of our designers not only worked the event, but also took the initiative to write up the things he noticed and his ideas on how to improve them. He specifically noted that even though our user flow for this tool was easy enough, one issue was that sometimes, if Wi-Fi at the venue was weak, the product would log you out and make you re-sign in. He came back with ideas to simplify the sign-in process if the device disconnects from WiFi or has a poor signal. That was one example of seeing how the product operates firsthand, the pain points our users encounter, and then determining how to potentially address them.
One time, I was at an event, and I noticed that when someone added their ticket to their mobile wallet, the event name would be very long. That organizer had multiple events in the same timeframe, and the naming convention made it so that you couldn’t differentiate between event tickets within a digital wallet.
That was a huge realization that we wouldn’t have noticed unless we were out there on the event floor. We came up with a solution to include some guidance for our users that says, “Hey, if there’s something important that distinguishes between each event, make sure it’s in the first 50 characters so that attendees know which ticket is which.” We were able to work with that client onsite, dynamically, to change the name of the events that day, so that all the following events on that same day had updated names. And it worked. It was like we were able to prototype it live, and test it out, right on the spot.
It was one of those things that nobody had even thought about. The naming of the ticket might have been great for SEO or if you’re reading it on a website, but for the specific purpose of displaying your ticket in your Apple Wallet, for example, it was hard to use.
Yes. For our TicketLeap product, we have a feature that we call an organization listing page. Essentially, if you’re an organizer and create a few events, all of your events will show up under your page. We found that this feature really helps with discovery for the event organizers because users can follow their page to see all the events they’re putting on.
We included this design and feature in our TicketLeap product, but not in our enterprise ticketing solution, ShowClix. In that product, we displayed single events, instead of also listing them together on an organizer page. But, when we worked with one of our largest clients, they specifically asked for a page to display all of their related events in one collection. That way, a customer could see all the event options, decide which they wanted to attend, and add the individual events in their cart for an easy, single check out.
When the client came to us with this idea and requested a multi-event page, we wanted to apply what we had in place for our TicketLeap platform. We knew the design worked and could be great for our enterprise customers too. The team took that, included additional functionality, and launched.
A lot of people are going down this path of technology for technology’s sake, which I strongly disagree with. You always have to start by understanding the problem and key needs. For our customers, that’s being able to get into the event and knowing how to get around. Once we solved that, we were able to move on to building delight-oriented features.
For example, everyone likes to get free things. As I mentioned earlier, we can leverage our technology so that when an attendee scans their badge, they’re automatically entered to win a prize. Similarly, we can do what we call “Fan Scan.” If you’re an attendee at the NFL draft, for example, you can use our app’s feature to take a picture with the trophy. You’ll get a digital badge and be entered into a grand prize. The picture gets sent to you automatically because it’s tied to your account. These are examples of unexpected delights fueled by emerging technologies.
They’re all great. Over the years, I’ve supported different parts of the problem. Earlier in my career, I was passionate about getting more young women into tech. I spent some time volunteering with NCWIT, which offers scholarships for high school girls who want to pursue computing in college.
I was also the women’s ERG group leader at StubHub — it was really valuable to create a community of women within the company who are there to support each other. Having allies and community at work is super useful and important.
When I joined Care.com, I went in with the goal of helping support the infrastructure for women in this country. This helps create jobs for women, who usually are the caregivers in a family and also helps enable them to continue in the workforce. Now, I find myself in the empowerment phase. In addition to my day-to-day job with Leap, I’m an advisor with Rebel Girls, which is a company focused on empowering girls to be confident. It’s been so fulfilling and I’m really honored to be part of it.
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