No More "Who's Free?": WhatsApp Saves the Day (and the Friendship)

👀 Problem Statement

Post-pandemic reunions are sparking, but scheduling snags are stalling them! With friends, classmates, and families eager to reconnect after a year of isolation, planning simple outings like dinners and movie nights is hindered by challenges in aligning everyone's schedules. This struggle to find a "perfect time" often leads to dropped plans and frustrated connections.

Our challenge: As a small but agile WhatsApp product team, we need to empower seamless offline gatherings by crafting a solution that lets users easily create plans and find alignment among participants, all within the familiar and convenient platform of WhatsApp.

Considerations:

• Limited team resources: With a small team of 2 backend engineers, 1 front-end engineer, 1 QA engineer, and 1 product designer, we must prioritize features that deliver maximum impact with efficient development.
• Quick release cadence: Our twice-weekly agile deployments allow for rapid iteration and testing, enabling us to refine the feature based on user feedback.
• WhatsApp integration: The solution should seamlessly integrate with existing WhatsApp functionalities and user habits to ensure a smooth and familiar experience.
• Simple activities: We should initially focus on facilitating planning for basic single-task activities like dinners and movie nights before expanding to more complex outings.

Goals

• Business Goal: Improve user experience by facilitating seamless plan creation and alignment for outing events within WhatsApp, eventually increasing user engagement post-pandemic.
• Team Goal: Develop and deploy a user-friendly event coordination feature, aligning with WhatsApp's messaging strengths and agile release schedule.
• Users Goal: Simplify event creation and alignment, making it effortless for users to organise successful offline activities on WhatsApp.

About WhatsApp

Background:

• Overview: WhatsApp is a leading cloud-based messaging application for smartphones. Users can send text messages, voice messages, photos, videos, and documents.
• Founded: 2009
• Users: Over 2 billion monthly active users globally.
• Market dominance: Popular in various regions including India, Brazil, South Africa and Europe.
• Features: Group chats, voice and video calls, end-to-end encryption, status updates, payments (in select markets).