Virtual Events Tech Hub
Covid as a catalyst for digitizing a face-to-face experience
Aligning public safety with emerging technology
Summary
The Virtual Events Product & Service Experience Team at McKinsey formed in June of 2020 in reaction to the rapid shift to remote work, meeting, and collaboration in the wake of Covid-19 pandemic. With no transition plan in place to convert hundreds of high-profile meetings and events from in-person to virtual, the team owned the process of: auditing existing legacy tools, vendor evaluation, optimizing & implementing a new tech stack for our environment, mapping a new service line and support model, training staff in new roles, launching an online portal for users to access virtual events tools & services, and ultimately adapting toward a hybrid model when in-person engagement started to resume.
INNOVATION SERVICE RESEARCH
STRATEGY
Scope & role:
I led service & experience design and research for the team from 2020-2022 as a Senior Product Design Manager. My working partners were a Principal Product Manager and a Tech Lead, and I aligned multiple teams of 30+ stakeholders and practitioners for comprehensive discovery research and workshopping.
We scaled the team to include additional capabilities - product support engineer, content design, change management, UX research, Agile coach - to support our the growth of our offering.
Key achievements:
Transitioning to a modern, optimized suite of products & sunsetting legacy products, leading to >$3m annual cost savings
Streamlining and simplifying the end-to-end events production and hosting processes
Enabling our users to better self-serve
Benchmarking, assessing and improving the overall quality of events and experience & value for event participants