Spaces by Matchbox

 

A virtual event platform for professional associations offering a range of  innovative event design solutions.

 

MY ROLE

 

As  Product Manager for Matchbox, my main role was to develop new products, features, and use cases from conception to launch. I developed the vision and strategy, conducted research, and user interviews, managed customer onboarding, oversaw AI  training, and worked closely with the President, CEO,  CTO, design team, and engineering to ideate, develop and launch new initiatives.

 

Held design thinking sessions with clients, partners and internal team members to ideate new ideas for the platform.

 

PRODUCT

 

Matchbox's main product "Spaces" leveraged "Simu-live" events for a high-engagement experience.  Simu-live means that that panel discussions are pre-recorded, but speakers are encouraged to participate live in the chat, generating a much livelier, engaging discussion and up to 47% more chat than your typical virtual live panel.

 

Clients loved the our platform and services' ability to help them create an engaged audience, a substantive discussion that intentionally generated valuable insights from their collective membership.

 

EVOLUTION (ORIGIN STORY)

I joined Matchbox at the height of the global pandemic.  At that time, presenters and associations were desperate to get their events online, were unfamiliar with the medium, unsure how to get a good ROI for sponsors, or how to deliver the kind of value with virtual they were used to with in-person.

 

The leadership at Matchbox were however anticipating a shift as restrictions eased.  Matchbox had many innovative event designs and ideas how to do to events better.  We needed to productize this expertise in a way that virtual events could have a niche value, deliver a specific ROI to the customer,  help drive towards a specific business outcome.

 

We needed to balance the roadmap to meet existing clients needs, both at the individual user level, the buyer level (heads of professional associations),  back-end efficiency and capacity, growth and expansion.

 

• Created internal features designed to improve capacity of design team by 10%

• Delivered accessibility features that were critical to heads of associations (our clients).

• Built hubspot integration to be able to transfer hubspot datasets to Spaces (removing need to do it manually)

• Created networking features using meta-tags to match with like interests.

 

METRICS

• Simulive panels generated over 47% more chat.

• Able to support very large events with over 100 sessions.

• Created high engagement events with 35% lower session attrition than average

• Created proxy metrics for success i.e avg chat length was a good indicator that the discussion was robust and attendees were getting value, as was session attrition.