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.
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.
That worked for individual changes, but organizers managing hundreds of sessions had to repeatedly open, edit, and save sessions one by one.
① Individual editing
Each session had to be updated separately.
② Repeated actions
The same changes had to be performed over and over.
The opportunity wasn't simply to add a faster editing tool. It was to change the scale at which organizers could work.
How might we let organizers make changes at the scale of their agenda without losing control of what gets changed?
….
From individual edits → to agenda-level actions
I designed bulk editing to let organizers make large-scale changes without losing visibility or control.
Step 1: Change the unit of work
Instead of organizers editing 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.
How do we give organizers more power without making them afraid to use it?
The solution needed to make bulk changes fast while keeping their consequences visible.
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.
I introduced a review step that surfaces conflicts and affected sessions 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.
What did I learn
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.
Bulk actions need trust
The more powerful an action becomes, the more important it is to show users what will happen before they commit without worrying.
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.