CVENT / MANAGING COMPETITIVE SETS
Turning a service-heavy compliance workflow into self-service
I led end-to-end design and research for a tool that lets hotel sales teams create and manage competitive sets directly, with real-time validation and guidance built into the workflow.
Senior Product Designer · sole designer
End-to-end research + product design
Q4 2025 - Q3 2026
THE PROBLEM
Hotel sales teams depend on internal teams to create competitive sets, interpret compliance rules, and resolve issues.
THE DESIGN CHALLENGE
Translate complex, changing rules into real-time validation and clear next steps, so customers can build valid sets, correct issues, and understand when edits were allowed.
THE OUTCOMES
Customers can now create, validate, and manage sets directly in the product. Early customer feedback is positive, and internal teams report less routine work. The reduction has not yet been quantified.
THE PROBLEM
How do we turn an entire service workflow into self-service?
The visible workflow looked simple: choose hotels, validate, save. Underneath were conditional compliance rules, edit restrictions, hidden Cvent-added venues, and a service process where people interpreted failures for customers. Before I could simplify the experience, I had to help the team align on what those rules actually meant..
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CENTRAL IDEA
01 / THE FOUNDATION
Explain failure and provide resolutions.
A technical error message was not enough for self-service. I paired a persistent validation rail with venue-level guidance so users could see what failed, why a rule applied and what to change while building, rather than after choosing the entire set.
02 / DESIGNING THE LIFECYCLE
Make constraints clear before they become blockers.
A valid set wasn’t always editable. I treated saving, lockout, and editing as one lifecycle-surfacing each constraint when it became relevant.
INTERNAL STUDY / Q4 2025
Clarity around consequences, timing, and ownership came up repeatedly.
"What happens below 9 venues, the six-month lock, and who last changed the set?"
03 / CHALLENGING THE CONCEPT
A valid suggested set was not necessarily useful.
We initially explored a prebuilt Suggested Set. Internal research challenged the premise quickly: most clients already knew who their competitors were. What they wanted was optional help filling gaps — not a system choosing the whole set for them.
INTERNAL STUDY / Q4 2025
All 12 internal participants said clients typically knew who they wanted in their set.
"Suggestions could be useful for newer DOSMs or when someone needs another venue to add, but not complete sets."
PRODUCT JUDGMENT
Suggestions help users get unstuck without choosing their competitors for them—and the resulting set still has to pass validation.
WHAT CHANGED
Eliminated the need for a separate internal support tool.
Competitive-set validation and guidance now happen directly in the customer product.
Multi-property bulk upload and creation workflows
REFLECTION
User simplicity did not mean simple to design or build.
Self-service required the product to absorb the exceptions and recovery steps people had previously handled manually. I recognized early that the scope was being underestimated, but I wasn’t always effective at making that complexity visible to the team. Next time, I’d surface the rules, dependencies, and downstream effects before timelines and expectations hardened.
SELF-SERVICE PRINCIPLE
