Making complex event agendas easier to manage at scale
Redesigning Whova's agenda management experience so organizers can make large-scale schedule changes faster, safer, and with greater confidence.
Meet the Team
1 PM · 5 Engineers · 1 Designer
What is Whova?
The agenda is the backbone of an event.
Whova helps organizers manage registration, speakers, logistics, networking, and attendee experiences. At the center of all of it is the event agenda - where hundreds of sessions, speakers, rooms, and schedules come together.
The Problem
As events grew, agenda management became a scale problem.
Organizers weren't just creating individual sessions. They were constantly reshuffling rooms, adjusting times, moving groups of sessions, and maintaining relationships between parent and sub-sessions.
What worked for a small agenda became tedious and error-prone at scale.
Moving one session is easy. Moving 30 sessions while keeping their rooms, times, and related sub-sessions aligned is not.
The Challenge
Managing a large event agenda shouldn’t mean managing hundreds of sessions one by one.
Whova organizers often manage complex agendas with hundreds of sessions across multiple tracks, rooms, and time slots. They also need to handle recurring sessions, parent and sub-sessions, breaks, and frequent schedule changes.
As agendas grow, even simple tasks become tedious.
Moving one session is easy. Moving 30 sessions, changing their room and time, and keeping related sub-sessions aligned is not.
The challenge wasn't editing a session. It was changing a system of connected sessions without breaking the agenda.
Research
To understand where organizers struggled most, I looked at how large agendas were created, updated, and maintained.
This shifted the opportunity from making individual sessions easier to edit → helping organizers manage changes across the agenda.
Design Opportunity
From managing sessions → to managing an entire event schedule.
The existing experience worked well for individual edits, but large events required organizers to think beyond a single session.
I reframed the problem around three principles:
The existing experience
Session Manager was optimized for editing one session at a time.
BEFORE
Move 30 sessions
Open session
Change time
Change room
Save
Repeat ×30
1. One-at-a-time editing
Every session required its own update.
2. No group action
Similar sessions couldn't be changed together.
How might we let organizers make changes at the scale of their agenda without losing control of what gets changed?
….
I designed a bulk editing workflow that lets organizers make large-scale changes while maintaining visibility into conflicts and related sessions.
Step 1: Select a group of sessions to move
Instead of requiring organizers to edit sessions individually, I introduced multi-select actions directly within Session Manager.
The goal: make a group of sessions the primary unit of action when organizers are making schedule-wide changes.
Step 2: Make the consequences visible
Bulk actions introduced a new risk: organizers could change dozens of sessions at once without realizing what else might be affected.
Instead of waiting until after the action to surface errors, I designed a review step that shows potential conflicts before the change is committed.
The goal wasn't to stop organizers from making complex changes. It was to give them enough information to make those changes confidently.
Edge Cases
Bulk editing only works if it handles the cases that make event schedules difficult in the first place.
Impact
This project was about more than adding individual features.
Together, these improvements changed the way organizers could interact with their agenda - from manually maintaining individual sessions to managing the schedule as a system.
The redesigned experience gave organizers a way to:
Make changes at scale
Update groups of sessions without repeating the same action dozens of times.
Understand consequences
Review conflicts and affected sessions before committing changes.
Maintain complex relationships
Account for parent/sub-session dependencies during schedule changes.
Then, if you have actual numbers, put them here.
What did I learn
01 — Complexity isn't always the enemy
The goal wasn't to hide the complexity of event scheduling. It was to surface the right complexity at the right moment.
02 — Bulk actions need trust
The more powerful an action becomes, the more important it is to show users what will happen before they commit.
03 — B2B design is often about orchestration
The biggest opportunity wasn't making one interaction faster. It was helping organizers understand and manage relationships across an entire system.