Watch Daniel Pardes (Twitter, LinkedIn), VP of Product, and Prerna Singh (Twitter, LinkedIn), Senior Director of Product for updates on Meetup’s product roadmap. They shared recent releases and plans for the second half of the year. They’re also seeking your input as they begin work on the new organizer app beta test, so check out the recap and recording to learn more.
Main Takeaways for the Product Roadmap:
Recent Updates
- Group settings pages: There’s a new dashboard in group settings, which has shipped globally to all organizers. It’s been updated to a more modern UI, but most importantly, we’ve made the pages easier to use. We’ve updated instructions, help text, and error messages so you have more guidance when making changes. Similar content is now grouped together for easier edits. We’re planning to keep updating and iterating with new features.
- New logged out homepage globally: Visitors have the same homepage experience regardless of their location, and we’ve improved the translations.
- Network event scheduler: Meetup Pro admins can now create a network event and share it across multiple groups within their network. This tool allows event creators to choose which groups to promote the event in, apply edits to the event across all groups selected, and see and communicate with all network event attendees. This new feature streamlines the experience for hosting an event in multiple groups.
- GraphQL updates: Public APIs are a powerful tool for our Pro organizers, allowing organizers to extract and share info from Meetup to other external applications and vice versa. With our new endpoints, we’re using a much more modern framework and have great documentation to support it.
- Customizable subject lines: This was a highly requested and critical feature that we didn’t have before. It was prioritized and built as a result of feedback from Pro customers. Your feedback influences what we do and helps make the product better!
- Mobile app widgets: Now available on iOS and Android, mobile app widgets make it easy to access upcoming and recommended events right from your home screen.
Bug fixes
- Photo uploader: Our goal is to be transparent when features don’t work how they should. We’re aware that uploading photos hasn’t always been the most reliable experience. Over the years, we’ve used different photo systems, so we’ve recently revamped it. There’s a new user interface, but more importantly it’s a tool that simply works. We’re still making sure it works in every use case, and we’re almost there.
- Contact members tool: We’ve heard from many organizers that the contact members tool doesn’t reliably send emails to members. We’ve migrated to a new system that provides better deliverability. There’s also a new setting that allows organizers to receive every message they send, so there’s no more guessing if the email was sent.
Up next in 2021
- Enabling hybrid events: We’re working to allow an event to be both in person and online, letting organizers share a physical location and a link on their event page. We expect to have the next iteration in the next few months.
- Autocomplete in search: We plan to have autocomplete in search to make it easier to find relevant events and groups to join.
- Better iPad support and Siri integration: A lot of people use Meetup on their iPad, and it’s not as great of an experience as it could be. We’re planning to support Meetup on an iPad, making it more consistent, easy to use, and accessible. We’re also working on Siri integration, allowing you to ask Siri for information about your upcoming Meetup events.
- Reconfiguring and rebuilding outdated tools: There are a handful of obsolete features that would need to be overhauled to make them usable again, and we’ve made the hard decision to remove those features. We have a small dedicated group that use them, but it would take a lot of work for us to bring them up to our standards and continue to support them. Starting August 31, /files, /polls, and /feed functionality will no longer be accessible. We don’t fully support them already and most people don’t know about them. Our goal is to find the functionality organizers need and put it on the platform. We’re committed to making Meetup more reliable, faster, and improving quickly, so please send your feedback!
- Organizer mobile app: An app for organizers is in development now, and a semi-public beta is planned for later this year. Our current Meetup app doesn’t have all of the functionality that organizers need, so we’re looking forward to your feedback to help us build just what you need.
Top Q&A / Resources:
- What functionality can we expect from the organizer app?
- The goal of the beta is to figure out the right balance of features and what organizers need the most when they’re on the go. We don’t know exactly what that looks like yet, and we’re looking to organizers to give us feedback on where it goes.
- I use one of the features that’s going away—what should I do?
- We want to learn more—please reach out to us at productfeedback@meetup.com. Because these features aren’t supported anymore, we don’t know how they’re being used. We want to know what piece of the functionality would be most useful for organizers, and then we can consider building it.
- Do you have any plans to improve the messaging functionality?
- We know it’s not great, and it’s a huge priority to fix. It’s a complicated problem, but one we’re dedicated to solving. When we have more info, we’ll share it with you all. We’re looking at improving emails, discussions, and real-time communication.
- For feedback or feature requests, share with us at productfeedback@meetup.com. If you need immediate support, visit our Help Center.
- Sign up to be a participant in our next user feedback session: http://bit.ly/meetup-feedback-signup
- We’re hiring! If any of these problems seem interesting to you, please reach out to us or go to www.meetup.com/careers/
Last modified on July 20, 2021
