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Product Design

Controlling the Chaos

In the early days of virtual events, bringing content live with a click felt effortless. But as sessions grew more complex with slides, videos, guest speakers, and engagement tools firing at once, that magic faded. What should’ve been seamless became a maze of panels, tabs, and timing risks.

I led the redesign that brought clarity, control, and confidence back to live event production.

The Untold Burden on Event Producers

Goldcast’s live event platform helps producers and speakers manage and present content like slide decks, videos, and other media during virtual sessions.

But that’s only part of the job — producers are also juggling a suite of engagement tools like live chat, Q&A, and polls, all while coordinating guest speakers and managing layout changes in real time.

Before the Run of Show feature, event teams had no single, reliable way to plan and execute their session flow within Goldcast. Managing content was slow, manual, and error-prone—especially under live-event pressure.

The goal was to create a centralized, intuitive control panel that allows producers to plan and execute their entire event timeline with minimal clicks and cognitive load, resulting in maximum confidence

The Research

To better understand the problem space, I began with a competitive analysis. One key insight stood out: no other platform offered a unified way to manage all the moving parts of a live event. This confirmed that ROS could be a key differentiator for Goldcast—solving a gap others hadn’t addressed.

I also conducted seven customer interviews to explore how teams currently manage their live events. What these sessions uncovered:

  • Validated known pain points around managing cues, timing, and transitions.

  • Revealed new frustrations with disjointed tools and manual workflows.

  • Provided early feedback on initial design concepts, ensuring ROS was grounded in real user needs

The Insights

When I spoke with customers, one theme came up again and again: managing chaos in the moment.

Pain Points

  • Constantly switching between multiple backstage panels felt clunky and disorienting
  • Juggling external run sheets alongside Goldcast’s interface led to missed, time-sensitive actions (e.g., launching polls, triggering tickers)
  • Lack of clear visual cues made it hard to understand what was live, upcoming, or already done

What They Needed

  • Stronger visual orientation: highlight what’s live; gray out completed actions

  • Time-saving tools: pre-populated chat messages, pre-scheduled tickers, actions they could set up ahead of time

  • A rehearsal mode: ability to practice a session and then reset before going live

When I shared early design concepts, customers immediately saw the value of having everything consolidated into one centralized control panel as a way to make the live event experience feel less stressful.

From Insights to Implementation

With strong user feedback in hand, I expanded and refined the prototype, working closely with PM and engineering to define what belonged in the MVP vs. what could be phased in later.

Key Focus Areas

  • Partnering across design, PM, and engineering to shape a clear MVP foundation
  • Balancing user value with technical feasibility throughout iterations
  • Maintaining tight collaboration with the India-based engineering team through:
    • Weekly live syncs
    • Frequent async check-ins for fast alignment

One tradeoff surfaced early around event duplication.
In Goldcast, producers can duplicate an event to re-run repeat sessions, and many requested that their Run of Show automatically copy over with it. While clearly valuable, engineering flagged it as a heavy lift that would expand scope. To keep the release on track, I made the call to defer ROS duplication for beta and schedule it for GA in a later phase.

Catching Friction Before It Reached Live Events

As we approached the closed beta, navigating the build revealed remaining open questions—edge cases, micro-interactions, and end-to-end flow details that needed validation. To address these, I led pre-beta usability testing in our development environment to ensure Run of Show felt intuitive, efficient, and aligned with user expectations.

How We Tested

  • 45-minute task-based sessions where participants ran a simulated live event using Run of Show

  • Think-aloud protocol to capture real-time reactions and mental models

  • Participants included:

    • Early interviewees

    • CX-recommended power users

    • A mix of event types and experience levels

What We Heard

  • Strong enthusiasm—several participants called it “game changing.”

  • Rated as highly intuitive and easy to use

  • High value placed on:

    • Consolidation into one central control panel

    • Reduced stress for solo producers

    • Practice mode

    • Ability to pre-set chat messages and tickers

Usability Gaps Identified

  • Needed clearer indicators for current vs. next cue to stay oriented

  • Vertical space constraints highlighted the need for:

    • A global expand/collapse all

    • Better at-a-glance timeline visibility

These insights directly informed our final refinements going into beta—and shaped the improvements prioritized for GA.

When Power Users Start Calling It Essential

Early feedback has been incredibly positive.

One customer shared, “It was so helpful! It alleviated a lot of my webinar admin anxiety.” That really captured the core goal of this project: reducing stress in high-pressure, live-event moments.

more early feedback:

“Oh my god that ROS in the platform was life changing. Thank you for adding this.”

“I wouldn’t do a webinar without a run of show anymore… I would be sad to do a webinar without it.  It’s hard for me to remember to do all the things [during an event] … I really, really liked it, was really excited about it, 100% going to be using it again.”

“Oh my god, I needed this for so long! This is the definition of the product team building something I didn’t even know to ask for.

I’ve used it for two events now — one of our usual hour-long sessions and our big six-hour summit — and it completely changed how I prep and run shows. I used to rely on messy docs and huge spreadsheets, but during the summit, I realized I didn’t even need to open them because everything was already in the Run of Show.

It made collaboration so much easier, too. Instead of dumping a confusing spreadsheet on my co-producer, I could just say, ‘Everything’s in the Run of Show.’ Overall, total dream — I love it.”

Hearing that level of enthusiasm—especially from power users who run events every week—validated that Run of Show transformed one of the most stressful parts of hosting a live event into one of the most streamlined, giving producers clarity, control, and confidence.