Think Big, Start Small
Six years of building event software that keeps up with the people who run them.
Role | Years | UX Team | The short version |
Design lead, then Senior Manager of UX | 2020 to 2026 | Grew design from about 5 to 13 | We started small in a crisis, kept iterating, and it grew into world-class event technology. |
Why this work matters
The people who put on events go all in. Every year they try to outdo the last one, and it takes a village of brilliant people to pull it off.
The software is never the star of that show, and it shouldn't be. Its job is to keep up so those people can orchestrate. Everything below is the story of how we built something that could.
What shapes the product
The Problem
Understand it more deeply than feels necessary. In 2020 that meant running our own event before really knowing how to design anyone else's.
The People
Building software is a team sport. My best work came from making it easy for great people to do theirs.
The Principles
A few shared beliefs a whole team can rally around:
Go and see. Outcomes over output. Think big, start small.
Start small
Twelve weeks to turn venue software into a virtual event platform.
In March 2020, in-person events stopped almost overnight. RainFocus was built for big physical conferences, and suddenly there weren't any.
We had big ideas, like a channel-surfing experience where sessions played like a streaming service.
Using the Kano model and Jobs to Be Done, we kept the first version small on purpose. Rich session imagery, picture-in-picture, personal lists, and a Page Builder clients could use to make their own event sites. I led Page Builder as the hands-on designer while managing the team.
I loved it, but it wasn't what people needed first, so we set it aside.
Instead we ran our own virtual conference with whatever we could build, then pulled every stakeholder into a whiteboard retro.
In February 2021 we ran INSIGHT, our own user conference, fully virtual on the platform we'd just built. It wasn't polished everywhere, but it worked.
Build the team
The thing I'm proudest of isn't a feature. It's the team.
Things steadied and we could hire again. The product needed to grow fast, and so did the people building it.
I worked as a player-coach, designing when it mattered but mostly building the conditions for other people to do their best work.
We grew from about five designers to thirteen. Customers like Adobe ran virtual events at a scale we couldn't have imagined that first summer. None of it came from one big bet. It came from a lot of small, good decisions made by people who trusted each other.
Think big
The platform had grown up. INSIGHT went from a virtual event we held our breath through to a full experience, and in 2024 Gartner named RainFocus a Leader in its Magic Quadrant for event technology.
Outcomes 2020 - 2026
Metrics | Result |
Client retention | 92 % |
Implementation hours/event | –55 % |
First 5 months live | 1 M+ unique virtual attendee experiences, 2.5 M sessions streamed, 50 k one-on-one meetings |
Scale proof | “Over two million virtual attendees and counting” powered in 2020 alone |
“In powering many successful virtual events, RainFocus has been at the forefront of this digital transformation, helping clients navigate the pivot and optimize engagement.”
We overshot the Key Results we aimed for, proving that better discovery, not bigger budgets, drives virtual engagement—and future revenue followed.
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