// 06 · Consumer · Social
Plan-it: bringing friends together, one movie at a time
BookMyShow · 2016 — 2018
// Overview
To tap into the social nature of movie-going and deepen engagement within the BookMyShow app, we designed Plan-it—a native group planning and chat feature that let friends share movies, discuss showtimes, vote, and book tickets together.
While the MVP drove a major boost in sign-ups and early adoption, the long-term challenge of sustaining engagement within a “product inside a product” led to key learnings on speed, focus, and user retention.
// Problem & context
Group plans died in the gap between apps. Someone screenshotted showtimes, the group debated elsewhere, seats sold out, and the plan reset.
For BookMyShow, all that intent was invisible — and most of the group never signed in, so there was no way to bring them back.
// Process
// Shipping in increments
Plan-it was released at MVP level and kept growing with incremental features. What started as a basic chat that let users share movies from the keyboard was eventually stitched seamlessly into the rest of the product's pages.
Group plans died in the gap between apps.
// The hurdles
Stitching Plan-it into the product came with the risk of hampering existing flows. A bigger hurdle was a mandatory sign-up, which lost us some users and possibly kept whole groups off the platform.
The upside: we added 1 million sign-ups to the app — from which other products like BMS Wallet also benefited.
// Onboarding and the FOMO play
Once a healthy number of users showed interest, we leaned on their friends' profile pictures wherever possible — creating a sense of FOMO at a time when everyone wanted to be socially connected.
// Voting inside the chat
We used profile pictures for the voting feature too, which cut down the need to send multiple messages while adding a visual treat to the interface.
// Future concepts
Some of the strongest ideas never went live. These are the ones I still think about.
// Integration with WhatsApp
During the product cycle WhatsApp had taken over the market and was experimenting with businesses. Here's a concept for how BookMyShow could live inside it — still a possibility if WhatsApp ever adopts local apps the way WeChat does.
// Outcomes
1 million new user sign-ups, benefiting BMS Wallet and the wider logged-in ecosystem.
A heavy influx of college students, who made the most group movie plans and weren't protective about another sign-up.
We eventually discontinued the product: we weren't fast enough to keep shipping features that held attention, a product inside a product is easily forgotten, and WhatsApp advanced hard over the same year we took to launch.
An adventurous ride with complex use cases — and a lasting lesson in speed, focus and retention for the team and for BookMyShow as a product.
// Next up