How we evolved
When I joined, OTS was a $3.2M ARR company focused mostly on high schools and colleges. Leadership wanted bigger theaters with more revenue, but new ones were canceling within months because the software wasn’t ready for them.
Our process wasn’t set up to get us there, either. There was no clear backlog or roadmap, no system for deciding what came first, no regular planning, and no customer research. Each of those had to be fixed.
We started with a prioritization framework, then cleaned up smaller day-to-day problems and began interviewing box office staff. Their answers led us to redesign ticket checkout, the dashboard and show setup.
Three years later, midmarket theaters grew from 7 customers to 341, now 14% of everyone we serve.
For theaters and their patrons
Every patron’s purchase runs through it. We rebuilt it from the ground up.
Results: buying a ticket went from 14 clicks to 7, fewer than any competitor, and conversion rose 14%.
Customers couldn’t find half the features they paid for, and the box office they use every night was difficult to use, especially on a phone.
We rebuilt the dashboard around how box office managers told us they run their shows:
Setting up a show scared off new customers. We overhauled the experience, cut unnecessary steps, and the complaints vanished.
Result: setting up a new production went from 12 minutes to 6.
Theaters were paying for separate email tools they didn’t have time to use. We built email into the platform, with automated campaigns that reach the right patrons at the right time.
Results: 26% customer adoption, and email conversion rose from 2.8% to 3.6%.
Upgrading used to mean contacting an account manager. We let customers upgrade themselves, and learned that those on the lowest tiers were far more willing to jump to the top than anyone assumed.
Results: a 17% conversion rate, and 11% of Basic customers went straight to Platinum, our highest tier.
Subscribers bounced around before picking seats, and many never finished. We reworked the flow.
Results: twice as many subscribers finished seat selection on the first try, and subscription retention rose 13%.
Behind the scenes
One organized backlog and a process the team actually uses, instead of whoever yelled loudest.
We added planning and backlog-cleanup meetings, fixed how we estimated work, and brought design and QA in from day one (not just at the end as an afterthought). A look-back after every sprint kept the team improving, and progress took off.
Regular interviews and UX tests, with every Intercom chat and NPS response piped into our roadmap app.
Built in a week when nothing off the shelf fit. See PM Tools
Real usage data and A/B tests. We stopped guessing.
We built a Claude bot the whole company could ask about the product or a customer, so product managers and developers stopped getting pulled in to diagnose every question.
Three years later