2025
Tool redesign · Web + Mobile · 20k active users
Two months of design. One week of live testing. A tool that has to work the first time, every year.
Sole designer and de facto product manager for the Activities Tool, Slush's event discovery and management platform serving 500+ events and four distinct audiences: attendees browsing and registering, partners tracking leads and promoting their events, community organizers reaching a niche audience, and Slush's own team curating and supporting the function.
I owned the full platform-facing surface end to end: browsing, search, filtering, event pages, registration, event creation, and organizer management. I set the design direction, defined the constraints, and made the prioritization calls. There was no PM on this project; I filled that role. The CTO and Head of Tech were my primary review partners, pressure-testing designs and flagging gaps before handoff.
key outcomes overview
50+ screens and states designed across 5 surfaces.
Full set of toast and push notification copy rewritten.
New component patterns for cards, filters, registration, and creation flows.
Search, waitlist logic documents & documentation for handoff.
Some context
Slush is a global startup and tech event connecting founders, investors, and operators. The event runs on a digital platform: a suite of tools that serves over twenty thousand attendees each year. The Activities Tool is where those users discover, register for, and manage 500+ events happening during the Slush week.
The tool fell behind the user's expectations.
The Activities Tool had grown into two disconnected halves. The browsing side listed hundreds of events but didn't help anyone find the right ones: no personalization, a tab system with almost no engagement, and a layout that treated every event the same regardless of the user's role or interests. The creation and management side was even worse.
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PROJECT
CHALLENGES
Challenge 01
One shot per year to get it right
Challenge 02
No mature product function to lean on
Challenge 04
Four audiences, one surface
From three years of signal to a unified event tool
Post-event feedback, platform analytics, and partner requests accumulated over three years gave me a clear starting point. I synthesized the data and scoped the redesign with the CTO, prioritizing the browsing side first for its breadth of visual changes and user impact, while the creation and management scope finalized in parallel.
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Analysis & prioritization
Browsing redesign (iterative)
Creation & management
Documentation and DS update
Handoff
Analysis & prioritization
Three years of post-event feedback, Metabase analytics, and accumulated partner requests provided the signal. Filter and tab usage data revealed what users actually reached for and what they ignored, which set the direction for the browsing redesign. I scoped and prioritized features with the CTO.
Iterative design
The browsing side carried the most surface area and the hardest audience tensions, so it started first. The creation and management side followed once scope was locked. The design process was iterative; this phase took the most time and produced the largest volume of decisions.
Handoff & support
Handoff extended over several months alongside other projects. I supported engineers on interaction details and edge cases as features went live, going back and forth between this and other work as implementation progressed.
Cross-department requests for comparison work dropped by more than half within three months of launch.
The redesigned Activities Tool went live for 2026 and is currently in its first full event cycle. Quantitative impact (registration rates, fill times, no-show reduction, creation-to-publish time) is being measured against 2024–2025 baselines and will be updated after the event.
Initial feedback from partners and internal teams has focused on the event creation and management views: the on-platform registration fields and multi-manager support resolved pain points that had been flagged for multiple years. The tool was tested with the tech team and key stakeholders in a structured session after which some elements of the creation flow were moved around.
Personal thoughts
The design was handed over in parts so that engineering could start building while other surfaces were still being finalized. On a tool this size, with independent views (browsing, creation, management, event page), that parallel handoff kept the compressed timeline viable. I'd do it again, but earlier: scoping the handoff sequence at the start of the project rather than deciding it as design progressed would have reduced the back-and-forth during implementation. On a yearly cycle with one live window, every week of implementation friction is a week of testing lost.
XXX
Impact is still to be measured.