LeagueApps First Partner Workshop Recap
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LeagueApps held its first-ever LeagueApps Workshop in our Northern Virginia/DC office on April 22, 2014. A big goal of our partner management team this year is to create more opportunities for partners to connect with our product team and influence the evolution of the LeagueApps platform. So now, in addition to Partner Days (coming soon to a city near you!) we’ll also plan to offer more live workshops.The purpose of these workshops is to create an intimate group setting for our partners to help us dig into the product and better understand how each of them uses LeagueApps.
Our first workshop was awesome! We ordered pizza, had a few beverages, and dove into various product topics focused around how our partners manage their program registrations. Three of our DC-based partners made the trip over from our nation’s capital to hang out with us. Dan of NAKID Social Sports, Uy of RASL, and Zach & Alex of District Sports were the true stars for participating in our 1st workshop and for making it a fun and productive experience. Our caps off to all of them for taking time out of their busy schedules to participate. Jeff, Gautam, Steve and Asaf all participated from the LeagueApps team.
The small group setting was conducive for lots of great feedback and to share thoughts and ideas about how LeagueApps can help with their league management and operations. Registration and team-building were the focused topics of conversation, but we took away many key lessons from the workshop including:
1) Better Streamline The Team-Building Process!
Our partners stressed the importance of allowing their players to register and create/join teams efficiently. We found this conversation especially interesting, since registration is LeagueApps core product focus and we are constantly improving it for our partners. The workshop helped us identify several points that can make the team-creation process easier for players/members as well as easier for admins to manage. Mainly, we realize we can make a big impact by making it easier for captains (or coaches) and free agents (or individual players) to connect with one another.
A few neat ideas that were brought up include:
- Create a better player pool where captains/coaches can easily select their players
- Give each player the option to customize their profile. This will allow each player to share relevant information about them that make it easier captains to see what type of player they are (e.g. position, skill level, height). Players could then have fun with their profiles and include nicknames, quotes, etc.
- Give free agents the ability to message each other and form a team together. This would take the onus off admins, since they are currently the only ones who can amass free agents and form a free agent team.
2) Clearly Outline and Communicate Program Management Rules and Settings
We hashed through several complex scenarios involving admins managing their programs after registration. It was important for the LeagueApps team to identify our partners’ pain points and confusion regarding certain situations, such as moving players/teams from one program to another, as well as deleting a player from a team. We realize that it is our job to better document these product rules and provide more clarity for partners to understand how the registration system is designed.
3) More Efficient User-Experience for Account Admins
Many of our partners spend countless hours on LeagueApps, and often have great ideas about how their experience in the admin console can be more efficient (this was a hot topic among our partners at the SSIA conference as well). In our workshop, we discussed how admins need to access information quickly and with as few clicks as possible. LeagueApps can optimize our admin dashboards, as well as adding more options to search across various admin console pages. Ultimately, improving the user-experience for admins will help them spend less time repeating clicks and actions within the platform, and more time on marketing and growing their league.
Some specific ideas that came up:
- Calendar Feature: allows admins to see when games/events are happening each day.
- Dashboard Improvements: add a search box to the site dashboard that will allow admins to search by people, teams, programs.
- More player data on League’s Listing Page (“Manage > Leagues”). Ideally, it should show the number of players on each team.
At the end of the Workshop, we unveiled a few projects that are still in development (E-Commerce and SMS communication). Our partners gave us valuable feedback, particularly around different ways they would utilize real-time communications (SMS, Email, Phone, etc) to manage their game attendance, registrations, and payment dues.
Please let us know if you are interested to learn more about the Workshop. We’d like to plan another Workshop in NYC and via webinar in the next few months. Between Workshops and Partner Days we now have a few different forums to collaborate with our partners. We hope to see you at one of these events in the near future!
