The Meetup engineering team shares the latest news on our platform enhancements in this Meetup Live community update recording. Watch Rajib Ahmed, Meetup’s Chief Technology Officer & Chief Product Officer; Annyce Davis, VP of Engineering; Samantha Schwartz, Engineering Manager; and Eujin Measson, Director of Program Management & Ops, for a discussion on the technology Meetup is using, experiments we are running, and plans for improving our native apps.
Timestamps:
- Intro (1:58)
- Engineering Update (4:25)
- Search & Neighborhoods (10:34)
- Apps Update (16:10)
- If you’re interested in testing out the Organizer App (Beta) click here
- Q&A (21:38)
Top Q&A Questions:
- Can you speak to any improvements needed/requested/planned for search in relation to online events?
- Eujin: Thank you for the question. We do get a lot of requests based on how we should change online events versus real-life events. Right now there’s the ability to filter on those when you do a search query on Meetup. I know I spoke a lot about neighborhoods which is mostly about in real life but in general, we are trying to make them both differentiated.
- Rajib: One thing I’ll add to what Eujin just said is, that we’re looking deeply into the categories and how online versus in real life (IRL) impact that, which will help. For example, hiking — in-person hiking events — will be ranked higher than if you were talking about an online class for cooking. So there are many different things that factor into our relevancy and matching that we’re looking into and those are happening for online events.
- Would Meetup consider refining its email notification system for new members?
- Annyce: Yes, Meetup is not only considering it, we are working on implementing it. We do acknowledge that some members receive more than the ideal amount of emails. So we’re working on a project right now it’s called global frequency capping. What does that really mean? We’re going to look at a member’s behavior on our platform. Thinks like whether or not they’ve been opening emails recently, how they’re engaging with push notifications, etc. to determine the appropriate frequency to send them these outreach emails. So yes, we’re going to be considering it.
- What is the strategy for a separate app for organizers?
- Annyce: That’s a great question, we did a lot of research on this to try to determine what made the most sense, having a separate piece attached to the member app as we’re calling it, or a completely separate organizer app. The best way to think about this is maybe think about Uber, there’s an app for drivers and there’s an app for riders. It’s the same with AirBnB. The primary advantage is that we can move very quickly by having the app separated, as you heard from Sam. This is like a modified cross-platform solution, and we weren’t able to do the same thing quickly on the member app additionally. If I’m a member-only then why would I be interested in having a bulky app downloaded, that has all of this extra functionality specific for an organizer. So by us moving towards a separate organizer app, we could share some of the bulk that will include organizer-specific features. We did a lot of user research, in the beginning, and a lot of user research to determine which thing made the most sense.
- Sam: We plan to link the two apps so if you have both downloaded and you need to schedule an event, it’ll open the organizer app for me. So we’re going to make it as seamless as possible to how to have both apps.
Last modified on April 5, 2022
