Clubs Rollout Strategy

Indeed it was a narrow type of club that was given the feature to use . Any UAT program that does not take a good cross section of opinion nad feedback is doomed IMO . We are going to get something that is a good fit for that narrow club type that was coopted in . All those excluded ( for a long time ) are just going to get soemthing that will have a high likelihood to miss the target .

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@shooj any update you can give?

I’m more interested in the meet up function but I guess within clubs on the accuracy of results and being able to organise race meet-ups. The results at the moment are all over the place. Anything you can share in this?

Thanks :+1:t3:

I wrote a piece for Zwift Insider on how Clubs could develop.

https://zwiftinsider.com/zwift-clubs-future/

I agree that it seems like progress has stopped completely. I think @Mark_Cote_ZHQ @Mark_Cote is your man now for communication on the future of Clubs.

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What would be a nice bit of communication would be a general status of known developments @Mark_Cote_ZHQ:

  1. Accurate results in meet-ups
  2. Club functionality
  3. Event categorisation and rider selection (aka sandbagging solutions)

To name a few :+1:t3:

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You mean anything that gets launched with Futureworks logo attached to it . I cant think of anything that has been launched through this coming to anything and certainly in any accelerated delivery and responsive and engaged with user feedback , the whole idea of soft launching It seems to be to me ignored and missing and what we are left with is just a load of distractions to make us think something is being done , something we should just ignore or take on with a gigantic dose of yeah yeah salt .

@Mark_Cote tell us we are wrong to be so cynical and to continue to feedback (or ask if we can ) to help these projects get to market

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There’s a ton of work on clubs moving right now including several features, that while small, were requested by club owners - this month we got alphabetized route lists and a few other small parts.

There are some big lift items required to get clubs rolled out more fully including moderation of the content.

With regards to whether or not we should be cynical about FutureWorks. Well, we’ve let down the community with regards to the communication and timeline expectations for many of these features.

As a Zwifter, had I become quite questioning of where the status of much of this work was? Yes.

As an employee of Zwift now, I’m focused on working this with the rest of the product team. Many of our FutureWorks features are experimental by nature, but those that are truly features that are now depended upon by thousands of Zwifters - those are now robustly part of our roadmaps.

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Thanks @Mark_Cote that great to hear and thanks for acknowlegements , they do go some way to restore expectations . These updates you refer to are “great” but of course unless I am missing something is going on by and large hidden to the vast majority of “clubs” using the platform. There are a set of clubs who have access to this , and then everyone else is left wondering . I think following this thread it would be really cool to release a bit more , beta or not , to more users . FIrstly to help turn around the frustration but also I think maybe get a more rounded and wider feedback , gotta be good ( mostly ) :smiley:

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Thanks. :+1:

+1 to this!
Totally understand the desire to keep things like this to smaller beta group initially but this has been out for some time now and rolling out to a larger number of clubs is surely as important as making it perfect for the small number of clubs currently with access? It would also be a great way of supporting smaller or newer clubs, personally I’d find it invaluable now our club is beyond 100 members so have hit limits on simple things like arranging meet-ups.

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Absolutely this is no longer beta as it is being updated and those updates even finding there way onto release notes ! All that is happening right now is some clubs have preferential access to features and others dont . I have club members for my RL club actually preferring to ride for one of these zwift preferential clubs because they can offer more to members. This level of unfairness if it continues for much longer will seriously disillusion grass roots clubs like mine wanting to embrace zwift . If zwift are happy with that … carry on .They will have to live with that when the current exceptional circumstances resolve and we are not so dependent on there offering to help maintain our club cohesive , albeit with such frustration and lack of progress here , we will stop asking for this to be sorted out . We will stop asking not because we dont want it any less but we give up on zwift being able to deliver it . I think that has pretty much the case with a large perentage of the user base already with a catalog of these things never being done.

This is just one more nail in the coffin for me anyway on whether I think Zwift has any future whatsoever beyond its immediate and very short term popularity . There is a very small window still left to turn this round but its just that , very small and shrinking by the day .

What updates have members had and what features your RL club members are using?

Club events for starters.

What else? I can see club rides in Companion App and the same rides in Zwifthacks with more powerful filtering tools.

Feels a bit harsh for you to acknowledge Mark’s note above and in a short amount of time throw the toys out again without seemingly justified reason, apart from a few days have since passed.

Glad you are happy with the way things are and your zwift club is flourishing , dont doubt there are many who share that view .Opinion accepted.

I state mine ( I think shared by many many people , including many very prominent zwift “insiders” as it happens that club features should be rolled out now ). Mark kindly acknowledged the issue , but that is not the same as having zwift delivering on his promises . That still has to happen . The pressure is still on .

Some may not like it or wish to discredit by making value judgements but Its not unreasonable or irrelevant to highlght the time window to get everyone on side is now , given Zwifts primary user base is northern hemisphere the active user community is very much at a seasonal peak but more specifically with many clubs currently limited in cycling together because of lockdowns zwift have a unique opportunity to capture and hold a large user base going forward , that ( at least in the UK in the last 2 days) has definately started the clock rolling down considerable faster to the end of that window.

I have spent a level of time and energy to establish zwift as a club activity . What I am not going to do however is bang myself against a wall on this as if I am accountable for it not living up to expectations.
I just wont encourage or advocate club usage (of zwift)…

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Dont believe I did actually state my view on Clubs but nice of you to make crap up on my behalf.

I dont use Clubs because it has no useful features for me (and very likely a lot of others) which I suspect is why Zwift wont let it go mainstream yet. So actually, no different to you which is why I am hanging around this thread!

And I was angling to find out what you think is in Clubs so I could provide feedback to you about its functionality (or lack thereof).

Yes, we are both entitled to provide our feedback in whatever manner we feel appropriate, I just dont think its cool to have another go at Zwift a few days after you last did when they said they have stuff to get after (and we all know how long it takes Zwift to get after anything). But you do you.

I don’t quite share the view of those catastrophising over Zwift’s demise and that is not what my post is about, all I see is a hypergrowth company going through some serious growing pains like many have before.
I do however think they could get some good favour with some longer term users by rolling clubs out a little more widely, what do you think @Mark_Cote ?

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Far and away the biggest thing for me is club rides/events/meet-ups.
As you note some of these are listed in main events, however these are public rides, not private club ones, and as I understand it Zwift are not accepting new organisers putting on rides anyway at the moment.

My use case is I have a club with over 100 people, many of those people regularly put on group rides open to others, however meet-up functionality is capped at 100 invites so we either miss people out or have to go through the hassle of using another invite to gather RSVPs first. This pain is further exacerbated by not being able to remove people from an invite list if they decline, to free up space for others.

Great notes everyone, thank you for these.

74 groups that were chosen well before I began at Zwift have “Clubs” beta access. This toolkit does not allow the creation or deletion of events. That’s a pretty big limiter FWIW. This reason alone is why we’re not rolling our Clubs wider yet. We’d be in the same situation we’re in today and we don’t believe we could offer good service from our events team (currently targeted at 24 hour service via clubs@zwift.com or events@zwift.com).

Moderation, content categorization, and quality measurements are also very much needed for us to refine our public calendar. We’re now hosting 2k-3k events/week on our public calendar and our discovery tools need to evolve to ensure that riders can find your events! This also means many public events today will likely become private and discovered/enjoyed by your club members, versus being over the public calendar.

These limitations (which might sound easy to fix, but are more complex across ZC, web, game platforms) are why we’re holding the beta at the current limit. I want to offer these self-service tools to more of you as much as you want them but we have a bit more cleanup and formalizing before we expand.

Finally, we’ve hired a super experienced, dedicated product manager that is across this work - Clubs and Content Discovery and he’s been doing incredible work. We’re aligning roadmaps and rest assured, Clubs is his number one priority.

I hope that the above gives a bit more context on why we’re not yet rolled out more broadly.

Thank you - appreciate all you do for the Zwift community.

Mark

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Ok, thanks for the update! Do you have any timeframe of when clubs might be rolled out? Like in the next 3 months? 6 months? year? 5 years? etc.

As discussed earlier in this thread, there are features updating monthly as they have been since December. Once we feel we have the necessary foundation where most clubs are served well, we’ll look to expand.

I don’t have a time table at this moment as some of the trickier work is in discovery. Most likely on the shorter end of your time frames.

Mark

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