Customizing for Calendly

A team of MMM students reimagined the popular scheduling app's on-the-go experience for their Business Innovation Lab project.

The glow of smartphone screens illuminated the faces of Stephen Wong (MMM '25) and his classmates as they huddled in a corner of a classroom, their fingers swiping and tapping through the familiar interface of Calendly.

Their minds were already racing ahead, envisioning a new mobile experience for the popular scheduling app. This wasn’t just another class project. It was an industry challenge that would test their newfound design-thinking skills.

The team was starting a 10-week journey through the Business Innovation Lab (BIL), the culmination of the student experience in Northwestern's MBA + MS Design Innovation (MMM) program — a dual-degree program between Northwestern Engineering and the Kellogg School of Management.

“It pushed us to really leverage our MMM skillset,” Wong said. “Coming to an end-solution that summarized all our work throughout the program was very exciting.”

The MMM team was tasked with differentiating Calendly’s mobile experience from its desktop counterpart.

Wong and his teammates quickly realized their familiarity with Calendly was both a blessing and a curse.

“Having used Calendly before, all of us came in with an inherent bias on how to approach the project and improve their mobile experience,” Wong said. “We had to recognize that what we wanted from the app was not necessarily what the general user base wanted.”

To overcome that challenge, the team members leaned heavily on their MMM education.

“We were doing ethnographic research in a different class we were taking in the same quarter as BIL,” Jing Lang (MMM '25) said. “This method helped us design the discussion guide for our interviews.”

The team committed its energy to understanding the problem through research and insight generation. The students applied frameworks learned in classes like Research - Design - Build, analyzed scattered qualitative data, and told stories of solutions with prototypes and storyboards.

As the project progressed, the students faced a variety of hurdles. One of the biggest was aligning their vision with Calendly’s expectations. The company gave students some clear ideas where it wanted to go with its mobile experience, but that didn’t necessarily align with what users were telling the MMM team they wanted, Wong said.

By leaning on their MMM lessons, the team made a strong case that led to equally strong buy-in during the final presentation.

For Zach Lonsdale (MMM '25), the project reinforced a crucial lesson about innovation.

“We were reminded of the importance of being comfortable with ambiguity,” he said. “Sometimes the area in which we can make the most impact is not readily apparent, and you need to do some exploring before you hone in on the actual problem.”

Lang and Wong appreciated being able to integrate everything learned from previous MMM classes into a self-directed consulting project with a real industry partner.

“We realized that there is no one-size-fits-all approach, and it is crucial that an individual and team stay nimble when solving dynamic problems,” he said. “There is no room for ego when a team is truly aligned with accomplishing a goal.”

That lesson is one of many Lang, Lonsdale, Wong, and teammates Chanaksha Gorentia (MMM ‘25) and Katia Kim (MMM '25) learned from the experience.

Lonsdale said another key takeaway was that confidence can come with time — it doesn't have to be present right away in order to have an impactful idea.

“We did not have 100 percent confidence in the solution we were working on right away,” he said. “But as we iterated over time and continuously redefined the problem, we were able to come up with a result we were all proud of and could back up with evidence.”