Product development at Eventbrite is a practice centered around understanding what our customers need, so we can enhance current features or build new products. In order to achieve this, our product team collaborates across multiple disciplines throughout the company to ensure we’re thinking about customer needs from all angles.

Who is involved in product development?

At the heart of product development is collaboration. We unite knowledge and expertise from different teams across the company, including Research, Product Analytics, Product Marketing, Engineering, Design, and Product Management, to be able to make the most-informed decisions about what we can improve on and build for our customers. Our Customer Experience teams also play a critical role in providing important feedback from creators and attendees in the process.

What is the product development process itself?

Every day, our product development team gathers data and information about how our customers use and engage with the Eventbrite platform. We also have a research team that regularly surveys and interviews both creators and attendees to hear directly from them what’s working and what isn’t to uncover opportunities and key problems.

This includes analysis of purchasing and engagement patterns on our websites and mobile apps; review of direct customer feedback and app reviews; market research through customer interviews or surveys; and we also evaluate results from past initiatives to learn what has resonated with customers. 

Additionally, we conduct competitive research across the industry and of other best-in-class products to ensure we’re aligned with best practices, as well as identify opportunities to differentiate and innovate on our solutions. All of this evidence is gathered together and synthesized into clear product goals and problem statements to guide our development teams toward solving a common goal.

Our collaborative process in action

We recently launched changes to our checkout order form where creators can collect information from ticket buyers and ask them specific questions that could be useful for demographic or marketing purposes. However, because these questions were asked before a ticket buyer completes payment, this caused some friction for consumers in the checkout process and may have resulted in them not buying a ticket. This was the process for how we solved it:

Our design team facilitated a workshop where we leveraged “design sprint” techniques to brainstorm, prototype, and validate ideas. The whole cross-functional team came together to sketch ideas, discuss what will have the biggest impact on customers, and then validate them by showing draft ideas to users to get quick feedback. At this stage, our engineering team started to define the technical aspects of our implementation. 

Sketching ideas and defining technical aspects

As our development team started to hone in on the solution of moving certain aspects of the checkout order fields from before to after a consumer buys a ticket, we got input from various departments, including those in our customer teams, to ensure we’re thinking of different scenarios a user may face.

After various iterations, we arrived at an agreed-upon set of requirements that we then executed on. We frequently break this down into different phases of release to ensure we can deliver value to customers quickly. 

Eventbrite interdisciplinary teams

In this final phase before release, we tested the new order checkout form and created a rollout plan which introduced the feature smoothly to our platform. This includes preparing our customer teams with information and knowledge about the release so they can assist users with any questions they may have.

We usually build in a plan that allows us to pause a release and react immediately if any sort of issue gets detected. We also ran an A/B test and randomized the users who got exposure before or after checkout to measure objectively if it improved their experience, which is a tactic we typically use for any rollout. 

Post-checkout order form prototype tested with users

The most important aspect of releasing a feature is measuring the outcomes and iterating on it to make sure it is the best experience possible for customers. We may use the data from our A/B test or user feedback after release to develop the next set of enhancements. We always think back to the original customer problem we were trying to solve.