Xpo Exhibitions are the parent company behind around 20 of NZ’s best known consumer and trade shows; The Boat Show, The Food Show, EMEX, BuildNZ, Baby Show and many more.

With a truly unique set of business requirements, they had long been on the path of custom software development, most of their IP had become stuck in old legacy systems that were becoming a risk to the business, and for which there was no viable path forward.

Ultimately it was time to bite the bullet and rebuild everything; but, as is usually the case, this wasn’t about building like for like, but about reinventing the next generation of unique Xpo software, apps and tools.

Needless to say, Putti was up for the challenge and is proud to see new mobile and kiosk apps, as well as the mothership that holds everything together, Xpo Showtime, now rolling out to live shows.

The true challenge was that, although in theory requirements were defined by what existed, reality is quite different. The old software was poorly structured and in reinventing how it should work it was challenging to translate all user requirements. As is often the case, business software unique to an organisation is also uniquely specific; every last nuance needs to match the businesses way of working.

They often say that users don’t know what they need. In the case of Xpo they really do, but the inevitable edge cases and specificity is still a huge challenge.

For the customer facing apps the magic is more do with catering to a wide range of users and different ways of thinking; making everything feel natural and approachable, in order to minimize load on help staff at exhibitions.

Putti still believes in designing everything that comes out of the consulting phase in Figma; providing a highly visual and interactive mechanism for the rounds and rounds of feedback and fine-tuning that go into creating an excellent product, before committing anything to code.

This kept the main product builds as linear as possible, however there’s still nothing like everyone using products to push their limits and expose where further iteration is needed.

And sometimes that’s still the key; to be able to patiently iterate and iterate as new products get introduced and tested through phases with the client prior to the big release.

What’s great to see at the end of a long, multi-product roadmap is a suite of website, app and back-end software products, all cohesively working together to facilitate a highly complex business in a manner that feels natural to all parties, and that keeps everyone in sync.

At the time of writing all products were live and in the last phase of bedding-in; results we expect from here include increasingly frictionless visitor and exhibitor experiences, with steadily reducing admin time; ultimately extending Xpo’s market advantage whilst delivering ongoing cost savings back to the business.