Virtual events re-imagined for corporates, retailers & marketers

High-impact webinars, meetings and events worth watching — live or on-demand.

Industry

Virtual Events

Solution Customer validationDesignDevelopmentMotionProduct design sprint Year

2020 - ongoing

Challenges

Brandlive, an award-winning company shaping the future of work, wanted a partner that could help them bring their vision for re-imagined virtual events to life and deliver their clients a “Wow!” experience.

Amid the rise in home and remote working, companies have been dependent on functional but unengaging platforms like Zoom and MS Teams for large-scale meetings. Brandlive saw an opportunity to expand their product portfolio and bring to market products that facilitate revolutionary digital meeting and events experiences.

Brandlive chose Windmill to help support their team’s efforts to design and build their growing product portfolio.

Approach

To achieve their goals, the Brandlive product team and Windmill collaborated deeply on product design and development through extensive discovery and design sprints to agile development with multiple Windmill ‘squads’ and hosting and release management.

Solution

Together, Brandlive and Windmill designed and delivered early versions of Allhands for companies to create, stream and host their own meetings in a more engaging and ‘modern Netflix-for-work’ style. Designed for company kick-offs, enterprise-wide training, and, of course, all-hands meetings,
Allhands provides a TV-quality meeting experience that allows hosts to insert pre-recorded video into high-fidelity live video streams, promote and track engagement and deliver the experience across devices to better reach employees.

Windmill’s collaboration with Brandlive was then extended to support the growth of their expanding product portfolio, which now also includes:

• Hubs, a platform to support video learning and conversation;
• Greenroom, a video production tool;
• Events, a product for creating enterprise-grade events that feel spectacular;
• and Webinars.

In addition, Windmill has worked closely with the Brandlive team on the design and development of Brandlive’s amazing website: brandlive.com.

Discovery and design

Our engagement with Brandlive began with a Design Thinking workshop. Windmill facilitated its proven process online using remote collaboration tools. The first step was to define the challenge and outline customer personas and journey maps. Concepts and storyboards were created and after that, prototypes were designed and tested with Brandlive staff.

Subsequently, Windmill held a series of Design Sprint workshops with the Brandlive team that focused on specific product features.

Post-release support

After products went live, Windmill worked with Brandlive in a support and development capacity, providing release and DevOps infrastructure management. The team collaborated with the Brandlive Product Owners on how to maximize product value, monitored events to see how users utilized the platform and tracked how they behaved from a performance and scalability standpoint. A/B testing was used to test certain hypotheses to further build on and refine the products.

Development

For product development, a short-cycle approach was utilized to enable rapid releases. Windmill constantly tested features and prototypes with the Brandlive team in order to push releases to production more frequently, in some cases twice weekly. Brandlive Product Owners worked closely with the team to consistently align the backlog and immediate goals.

The products were designed and built with a micro-service architecture and digital experience tool kit to enable flexibility as well as consistency.

Impact

Windmill has been proud to support Brandlive in their growth and was excited to see them named by FastCompany as one of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies in 2021.

We have a lot to be proud of with our work with Brandlive. Together we have contributed to the design and development of an amazing suite of products that are redefining the future of work.

Brandlive continues to be an innovator and Windmill as a partner continues to support them as they grow.

Be sure to check out the Brandlive platform and products and ‘Make ‘em go Wow!’ at your next Allhands meeting, webinar or digital event.