An event is an episodic product, and the feedback window closes fast.

principle — attributed to Mark Brewster

A hotel like Sani in Greece runs continuously and can iterate day by day. An event runs once and disappears. There is one window to capture what attendees actually thought, and it shuts within seventy-two hours of close. After that the memory blurs, the inbox refills, and the moment is gone. Brewster calls treating the survey as an afterthought a total crime, because the episodic nature of the product makes the feedback loop the only mechanism through which the next event can be better. Skip the survey, or send it cold into an exhausted inbox, and the organizer ships blind into the next twelve months of planning.

For organizers whose post-event workflow stretches the survey send out by a week or more. Particularly relevant when comparing event measurement discipline to that of continuous-operation businesses.

post-event-measurement, feedback-loops, product-thinking