Background

In September 2023, the core team embarked on a mission to enhance the Calendly platform by integrating it more seamlessly into the meeting lifecycle. Traditionally, Calendly's role was primarily at the outset of meetings, facilitating scheduling between hosts and invitees. However, post-meeting engagement with Calendly was minimal, limited to scheduling subsequent meetings. Recognizing this as an opportunity, we set out to explore users' pre-meeting activities, preparation routines, and post-meeting actions.

Discovery & Research:

Our focus narrowed to our sales and recruiting personas, constituting about 25% of our customer base. Over two weeks, I conducted internal interviews and workshops with our customer success, SMB sales, and recruiting teams to gain deeper insights into their meeting dynamics and interactions.

Through these sessions, we pinpointed three critical stages in the meeting lifecycle where integrating contacts could enhance user experience:

1. Beginning: Automatically creating a contact when scheduling a meeting.

2. Middle: Facilitating host preparation for meetings with contacts.

3. End: Providing a means to store important notes or action items post-meeting.

Strategy:

Given that contacts were a novel feature for Calendly, extensive user validation was imperative to ensure market fit and alignment with user expectations. Feedback highlighted users' reliance on CRMs, CMSs, or ATSs before engaging with Calendly, underscoring the need for a unified solution. Recognizing this, I recommended targeting smaller sales and recruiting teams lacking comprehensive tech stacks, positioning contacts as a solution for managing contacts, scheduling meetings, and organizing associated notes and action items.

Collaborating closely with cross-functional teams, we developed a holistic strategy to integrate contacts into Calendly's ecosystem, spanning scheduling, meetings, mobile, and extensions.