Designing Features For Scale With Head Of Product & UX Karen Risvig Smooth Scaling: System Design For High Traffic podcast

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Designing Features For Scale with Head of Product & UX Karen Risvig

19d ago 34:30

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What does it take to build product features that hold up under massive traffic while still delivering a great user experience? Karen Risvig, Head of Product & UX at Queue-it, joins Smooth Scaling to share how her team designs for scalability, resilience, and security from day one. From invite-only waiting rooms to real-time visitor analytics, Karen breaks down the product decisions behind some of Queue-it’s most exciting features—and the trade-offs that come with building for scale.

Episode page

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This episode's guest is Karen Risvig. Karen Risvig is a dynamic product leader with extensive experience in the SaaS industry. As Head of Product & UX at Queue-it, she leads product strategy, roadmap execution, and a team of product managers and UX specialists. She brings a data-driven approach to decision-making and excels at turning complex challenges into clear, high-impact solutions. Karen is known for fostering cross-functional collaboration and delivering products that align with both user needs and business goals.

Host Jose Quaresma is the VP of Technical Engagement at Queue-it, working on the frontlines with some of the world’s biggest businesses on their busiest days, from Ticketmaster to Zalando to Home Office U.K. Each week, he’ll be joined by experts across industries, uncovering how major organizations design, build, and deploy systems that perform at scale.

This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo.

(00:00) - Intro
(01:05) - Career Journey
(03:45) - Projects vs. Products: Shifting Perspectives
(05:25) - Feature Spotlight: Invite-Only Waiting Rooms
(08:49) - Leveraging Customer Insights and Behavioral Data
(10:21) - Capturing User Attention
(11:48) - Reducing Purchase Friction
(13:17) - Early-stage Feature Evaluation and Idea Validation
(17:50) - Balancing Problems and Opportunities
(19:27) - Core Requirements: Scalability, Resilience, and Security
(25:14) - Scalability in Practice: Handling Massive User Interaction
(27:29) - Trade-offs in Product Development
(29:33) - Lessons Learned at Queue-it
(31:52) - Rapid-fire Q&A: Resources and Advice
(33:55) - Outro