I'm currently the product owner of the platform, working together with the product managers for strategy and roadmapping.
Results
On the first year of Pavilion, more than 70% of the Ateneo undergraduate population joined at least one club or organization.
The student body of the Ateneo de Manila University holds one of the biggest and most active organization communities in the Philippines.
With over 90 organizations ranging from tech, theatre, sciences, maths, to student publications, the university is widely known in the country for its org culture and active involvement in extracurricular activities.
One of the biggest events we hold as a student body is the Ateneo Recruitment Week — a program that exposes students, both current and new, to the 90+ organizations and clubs they can join in the university. Before the pandemic, the RecWeek was known as one of the loudest and fun events, with student leaders and members from all organizations going around an area in campus to promote their initatives and recruit members.
When the pandemic came, organizations became limited to the online setting, making it difficult to replicate the full org experience in the Ateneo.
Because of the pandemic, students, both old and new, lacked exposure to all the 90+ orgs in our university. This made it difficult for them to fully explore all the possible opportunities.
As a quick solution to this problem, we created a centralized org information hub for the student body. For Pavilion’s first iteration, I led the team as a product manager, conducting research, working with our designers, and managing our sprints to develop and ship the mobile app. Our main goal was to help students, especially freshmen, learn more about the different organizations the university has without having to go to their pages one by one.
After designing and testing the product, we were able to deploy it to the App Store and Play Store, releasing it to our student population right in time for RecWeek 2020.
This first iteration of Pavilion could be considered a success — more than 70% of the undergraduate population in our university signed up for at least one organization, with our product reaching more than 4,000 total users. There were more than 16,000 total signups for organizations.
While we did succeed in fulfilling our initial goal of increasing conversions for org signups, we failed to create a scalable product that helped orgs even after RecWeek. The app immediately died after the event, getting a retention rate of less than 4% after one month.
A lot of mistakes were made from a product standpoint — we lacked planning and strategy.
This mistake led to us creating a one-time success: a product that had no clear direction, and only set out to solve one minor problem in a large landscape of problems in club management that could have been tackled.
Our team and organization decided to move on to other projects after RecWeek, focusing on other services and events to help communities within and outside the university. Pavilion was stashed away into a vault, and we had little intent to bring it back the next year, considering another fact that only 2 out of our team of 6 would remain (the rest of the team were either graduating, or retiring from club involvement).
Fast forward to July 2021, we had a new set of eyes — ones that experienced the digital org and club life for over a year in the pandemic.
As org leaders ourselves, our (new) team had a clearer idea of what needed fixing. Throughout the year, we had a difficult time handling registrations, generating certificates, emailing participants, and reminding them about events. As students as well, it was harder to find events we wanted to join and to keep track of events we were interested in.
Learning from student leaders
This led us to a few assumptions — ones that needed more research. As the solo researcher and designer in our team, I set out to talk to a few org leaders to learn more about the problems they’ve encountered from an operational standpoint throughout the past online year. From these talks, we started finding more common patterns:
Event participant management was a huge pain point. From creating registration forms, cross-checking each registrant, emailing, sending calendar invites, and collecting post-event reports — these org leaders talked about the time these processes consume, and how it would sometimes lead to mistakes that affect participants, such as a lack of reminders.
Secretariats had a difficult time organizing and analyzing data they get — from demographics to retention, it was difficult to create formulas on Google Sheets on their own.
More often than not, post-event reports that were made are never used again. There is a lack of proper integration of analytics and a data-driven mindset in some organizations’ processes.
Talking to other students
We understood that the product we’re setting out to do is end-to-end, so I also talked to a few students who were not involved in org leadership positions. I focused on asking them about their experience with orgs and clubs online, and a few common patterns were uncovered too:
Student feeds — students will be able to store their org activity into one platform, allowing them to curate and personalize their feed to see relevant events. They also get to see a history of events they’ve joined and shown interest in.
Easy registration — with their accounts, students can register for events without having to fill out all the fields thanks to their stored data. They’ll also be able to edit and cancel registrations, if needed. Calendar integrations will also come with successful registrations.
Org catalogue — students can view a catalogue of all 90+ organizations and clubs in the university, together with the different events and initiatives each of them have. This gives them more access to find opportunities they’re interested in. The catalogue will also be open to the general public, not limited to students from the university.
After hearing these sentiments from both sides, we knew we had an opportunity to build an end-to-end SaaS that could help the Ateneo community in the long run.
Pavilion for organizations
After understanding the problems more and coming up with solutions, we summarized the initial services Pavilion could offer for organizations and clubs into three main points:
Event management — organizations can create events and registration forms to store all the data in one platform. From here, student leaders can manage participants, registrations, and event details with ease.
Org webpages — not all clubs and organizations in the university are privileged enough to have their own websites. With Pavilion, a webpage with information and a catalogue of all their events will be made available, and they’d be able to share these to their audience, partners, and sponsors to market and promote their initiatives.
Built-in CRM — to aid orgs with their goal of forming data-driven decisions and easy member management, we’ll slowly be incorporating a built-in CRM into the product to aid organizations with visualizing data, understanding their market and audience, manage member emailing, sending calendar invites, and reviewing engagement and retention.
Designs made by Ceej Atienza, Regine Sison, Dagny Yenko, and Sam Geronimo
Pavilion for students
To accommodate the opposite end of Pavilion, we also summarized the initial services it could offer for the general student population into three main points:
Student feeds — students will be able to store their org activity into one platform, allowing them to curate and personalize their feed to see relevant events. They also get to see a history of events they’ve joined and shown interest in.
Easy registration — with their accounts, students can register for events without having to fill out all the fields thanks to their stored data. They’ll also be able to edit and cancel registrations, if needed. Calendar integrations will also come with successful registrations.
Org catalogue — students can view a catalogue of all 90+ organizations and clubs in the university, together with the different events and initiatives each of them have. This gives them more access to find opportunities they’re interested in. The catalogue will also be open to the general public, not limited to students from the university.
We’re building this SaaS to scale — as the product owner working with tow product managers, we’ve created a roadmap to guide the team in shipping features incrementally.
Not everything can be released at once — we’ve emphasized this multiple times to our product team of 14. To visualize and guide us through this, the PMs and I are worked together with our designers to identify priority through the value-effort framework. This helped us map out our releases with a balance of user need and implementation complexity.
Now, we have a team of designers constantly communicating with different users from the student population, consistently doing research and understanding their needs as they design the next parts of the product. Personal note, I am truly amazed by the work they’ve done so far and the ownership they’ve taken with the direction of our research and design.
We also have a team of developers building the product with integrations to speed up the process. We’ve successfully split the team into front-end developers, back-end developers, and data scientists to work and own different parts of the product. Our PMs and data scientists are also working together to integrate Mixpanel analytics into our workflow to ensure we get a good feedback and behavior loop from our users.
Our overall vision for Pavilion is for it to become a SaaS ecosystem for organization and community management for universities around the Philippines. We could eventually tackle a more granular member management system, operational processes with university admin involvement (e.g. forms submitted to club moderators), payment processing through integrations, and many more.
We are targeting a closed beta launch by mid-February 2022, testing out the MVP with 5 organizations.
Our product managers have been focused on implementing scrum with our design, engineering, and data science teams, while working with me as a product owner to strategize and prepare sprints and roadmaps.
Key Takeaways
It’s been a year and a half since I started working on Pavilion. In that time, I’ve learned a lot as a designer, researcher, and product manager.
Let your users drive your strategy. Like I mentioned earlier, the first Pavilion lacked proper strategy and planning, leading to its failure after its first month in the market. I learned from this mistake by focusing heavily on customer development for the new Pavilion — all their insights and jobs to be done were used by our team to create a strategy that balanced both user needs and our objectives.
See the problem first-hand, then validate your assumptions. Experiencing the problem as an org leader myself gave me a clearer path to understanding the larger problems brought by the surface-level ones. It helped me empathize with the people I talked to more and dig deeper into their behaviors and motivations.
Keep the team motivated. Update the whole team with every process accomplished to let them see our progress as a whole. Be present when the team works to foster a collaborative environment. When times get stressful and pressing, encourage them by reminding them of how much they've accomplished and by showing them how close the finish line is. A well-motivated team will produce a high-quality product.
This case study was last updated on December 29, 2021. More results and insights will be added as the product releases into the market.
Special thanks to
my Pavilion co-founders: Franz, Harvey, Polly, Jeth, Audrey
