Atom Tickets case study

A well‑funded launch with a distinctive product — and early signs of trouble.

Atom Tickets was Lionsgate and Fox Entertainment Group's answer to Fandango — a mobile‑first movie‑ticketing marketplace built around a distinctive "Wheel" interface the founding team was proud of.

That summer the app left its Tennessee pilot and began nationwide coverage, backed by a "first ticket free" promotion in July. By September, several areas of severe underperformance had been detected. I joined in mid‑October to lead the response.

Strong new‑user growth was masking weak retention, fraud, and dead features.

Retention and engagement lagged growthNew‑user acquisition was healthy, but low conversion and poor 30‑day retention showed the app wasn't holding the audience it won.

The free‑ticket promo was being gamedHigh instances of fraud — throw‑away email addresses used to claim "first ticket free" over and over — inflated numbers and drained margin.

Flagship features went unusedThe headline capabilities — buying concessions and social planning — were essentially untouched by real users.

Targets calibrated to the business's lifetime‑value model.

Hold the acquisition engineMaintain a healthy organic new‑user rate while fixing what happened after install.

Multiply retentionDrive 2× D7 and 3× D30 retention, calibrated to the LTV target.

Lift repeat conversion by 20%Turn first‑time buyers into repeat ticket purchases.

Generate signal for partnersProduce attention and interest data valuable to studio and exhibitor partners.

From root‑cause research to every shipped screen.

I led the process end to end — researching and hypothesizing on root causes, then proposing behavioral objectives that product bought into before a single screen was designed.

Checkout with Friends was the riskiest addition: letting one buyer purchase and allocate tickets on behalf of friends joining them, a more complex flow than a standard single-ticket purchase. Before it shipped, I built a clickable iPhone prototype and ran guerrilla usability tests in public, approaching people already in line to buy movie tickets and recording each session. That testing validated the underlying approach but surfaced specific friction in the affordances and microcopy, which I refined before launch.

Design strategy

Explore scope & interaction approaches

Prototype, investigate, validate

Sequence strategic feature roll‑out

Design every screen & element

Support engineering, refine & iterate

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CEOCPOLead PMHead of EngineeringiOS & Android EngDir. Customer ServiceHead of Marketing