Redesigning Hive for the Events Industry

A simple way for event marketers to sell more tickets with smarter email and SMS campaigns

Tasks

Product Design, Product Strategy, User Research, Prototyping

Date

2023/2024

Results

Reached 60% conversation rate on our campaign templates; Campaigns created via our Event Hub were completed 15% faster; 10% of total campaigns were sent through our Event Hub in the first 4 months

Context

When I joined Hive, it was a flexible platform used across industries, but lacked direction. We saw an opportunity to focus on event marketing and repositioned Hive with purpose-built tools and workflows designed to help organizers sell out events.

Problem Areas

Despite having the tools in place, many customers weren’t running campaigns that consistently drove ticket sales. The product lacked the structure and guidance needed to support effective event-centric marketing.

Customers were using Hive’s tools in fragmented ways, without a clear workflow tailored to event promotion.

Campaign planning and execution were scattered across the product, making it hard to measure performance or stay organized.

Key campaign types like presales and SMS, important in event marketing, weren’t easy to set up or discover.

New users didn’t have a clear starting point. The product didn’t guide them toward best practices for promoting events.

Key Considerations

We needed to center the product experience around the full lifecycle of an event, from early signups to last-minute reminders.

Our tools didn’t provide a good starting point. We had to lower the effort required to run effective campaigns for smaller teams.

Campaigns had to be quick to create, easy to track, and simple to duplicate; across email and SMS.

Design Process

Discovery & Definition

We worked closely with event marketers to understand their goals, workflows, and pain points. I also helped establish a more formal product development process, introduced structured customer testing, and implemented product analytics with PostHog.

Exploration & Ideation

We analyzed usage data and ran whiteboard sessions to sketch a more event-focused product experience. Customer feedback pointed toward a need for a single place to coordinate and measure event campaigns.

Design & Prototyping

I led the design of several key tools (Event Hub, Campaign Templates, Presale Campaigns, and SMS Add-ons), using our MUI-based design system. Each was built around reducing friction and aligning with how event marketers already thought about campaign planning.

Refinement & Release

We launched incrementally and monitored adoption. We made changes like adding dashboard widgets and modifications to navigation patterns to encourage event-centric workflows and ran in-app experiments to boost usage of newer features.

Design Process

Discovery & Definition

Exploration & Ideation

Design & Prototyping

Refinement & Release

Challenges

Repositioning Hive meant not just shipping features, but shifting how customers used the product and how the team thought about its purpose.

Getting users to adopt new workflows required more than building new features, it meant rethinking how they entered and navigated the product.

Presale workflows were a known customer need, but we had to create a structured experience that felt native to the platform.

Many customers underused SMS, despite its effectiveness. We needed to surface it in the right moments and make it nearly effortless to send.

Hive’s prior flexibility meant inconsistent usage. Our challenge was guiding users toward consistent, high-performing marketing strategy without taking away control.

Solutions

We introduced a series of tools and design patterns that shifted Hive from a flexible platform to a purpose-built product for event marketers. The focus was on reducing friction, guiding users, and making campaign results easy to understand and act on.

We launched a Presale Tool to help marketers build early momentum. It enabled users quickly spin up a sign-up page with automated follow-ups, making it easy to capture interest and sell tickets before a general sale.

To improve campaign outcomes across the board, we introduced templates based on our learnings from top-performing users. These made it easier for all marketers to run effective campaigns without starting from scratch.

We launched the Event Hub, a central dashboard where users could create campaigns, track performance, and manage their events. It pulled together templates, metrics, and sales data, giving marketers a clear view of performance while helping them stay organized.

To drive adoption of the Event Hub, we reworked the product’s entry point. The old dashboard wasn’t driving value, so we promoted the events page to the main hub and added summary views to help users stay on top of live campaigns.

We increased SMS adoption by letting users send a text version of any email campaign in just a few clicks. By auto-copying content and simplifying the send process, we saw a clear boost in usage.

Final Notes

The transformation of Hive into an event marketing platform was both a product strategy and UX challenge. It required rethinking how users approached the tool, reshaping internal processes, and delivering features that brought immediate value to event organizers.

As the first product hire, I helped define this transition. Shaping product direction, designing new workflows, and collaborating closely with our engineering and marketing teams to make the shift a reality. The results spoke for themselves: faster campaign creation, higher SMS usage, and stronger performance metrics for event marketing campaigns.

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