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ROLE

Head of Product, Experience, & GTM

TEAM

(1) Executive Director

(2) Software Engineers

(4) Stream Managers

Creative Coordinator

Booking Coordinator

(1) Festival + (1) Marketing Co-Creation Committees

TIMELINE

1 year 

"I felt like I was a part of something even through [the festival] wasn't in person."

Anonymous Review

in Apple App Store

Digital MW + Mobile App.png
Digital MW + Mobile App.png

Virtual MidWay Music Festival + Summit

The Festival From Your Couch

Product Vision + Strategy

Market + User Research

Journey Mapping

QA Testing

Experience Design

Roadmapping

Brand Building

GTM Strategy

When the pandemic shut down live events, I made the call to take our in-person music festival fully digital. We built a 7-day, cross-platform virtual festival featuring 50+ music professionals, plus a React Native mobile app adopted by 20% of attendees. Everything was grounded in rapid research and an experiment-driven GTM, including weekly ethnographic audience experiments that let us learn and iterate continuously.

When COVID-19 shut down our flagship festival, I saw an opportunity to pioneer a new category: the digital festival. Through rapid user research with 6,000+ participants, I identified critical pain points - audience fatigue, engagement barriers, and tech friction - and designed an experience strategy to address them.

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I partnered with engineering to design and launch a mobile app that guided discovery and sustained engagement through an interactive lineup, favorites, and smart notifications. A soft launch with 15 users surfaced critical usability issues we refined before the public launch.

KEY RESULTS

  • ​Category-defining digital festival experience

  • 500+ household passes sold nationwide

  • 50+ artists across the USA

  • 20% app adoption

  • 360% social engagement surge

The Schedule

This year's festival (2021) was heavily influenced by COVID-19 and the affects of the pandemic on audience-members.

DAILY SCHEDULE

MORNINGS: Kick off the Day with MidWay

Each morning ticket-holders were invited to participate in exercise and meditation workshops, streamed via MidWay's private YouTube link. ​

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AFTERNOONS: Panel Discussions

We curated a lunch time panel series where music professionals got together to discuss hot topics in the industry. Panelist's were featured from: Secretly Publishing, Secretly Group, WestLake Studios, Live Nation, Omnian Music Group, La La Land and more. Streamed on VEEPS.

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EVENINGS: Live-streamed music and Artist Q&A's

We closed each day with a live-streamed show, featuring 2-4 artists from across the country. Streamed on VEEPS.​

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ALWAYS: MidWay Artist Takeovers

As a booth free programming to non-ticket-holders and as a guerilla marketing tactic, select artists took over MidWay's social stories (Instagram and Facebook) for the entire week. Content included: intros, announcing a new release, behind-the-scenes of their MidWay set and more.

Mobile Application

Virtual events were so foreign to our attendees; to ease the stress of uncertainty, I designed and launched a mobile application that condensed the virtual festival into an easily accessible and intuitive experience.

KEY FEATURES

  • Discover and save your favorite artists.

    • Built with artist discovery in mind, users could browse the lineup with direct links to artist music, then heart their favorites to build a personalized schedule.

  • View and edit your personalized festival schedule.

    • Users could access their saved artists in one place - view set times, artist details, and edit their lineup anytime.​​

  • View the festival schedule like you were in person.

    • "View by venue" allowed users to see the full festival schedule organized by venue to recreate the in-person experience and visualize how the event would have unfolded.

  • Hot-topic questions, answered.

    • Users got answers to commen questions with the FAQ - helping users understand how the digital festival would work, tips for their household viewing party and more.

"[Alexi] provided clear requirements for the application...[She designed] a straightforward user experience that augmented the experience of festival attendees. She was receptive to feedback and adapted her design quickly when features couldn't be achieved given the time constraints."

Jordan Gaeta

Former Software Engineer at MidWay

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