Ticketmaster Enterprise Pricing Platform
Denis Lesak
Redesigning the Platinum pricing tool to recapture GTV — and the fan.
Brokers were scooping inventory on-sale and reselling it on StubHub and AXS, leaving Ticketmaster's own properties barren minutes after tickets dropped. Platinum — artist-priced seats released incrementally at market price — was the counter-move. I led the 12-month redesign of the internal tool pricing specialists use to run it, turning a spreadsheet-era app into an integrated decision surface that grew Gross Ticket Value while keeping fans on the right side of the transaction.
Role
Lead Product Designer, Pricing Platform
Company
Ticketmaster
Years
2015 — 2018
Tags
Enterprise SaaS, Data Visualization, Operational UX, Decision Systems
Measured impact
GTV ↑
post-launch, sustained
Gross Ticket Value lift
−1 tab
no more context switching
Seat map merged into the tool
12 mo
design, research, rollout
01 — Problem
Problem
Within minutes of an on-sale, brokers swept the primary market and resold inventory on StubHub, AXS, and the rest of the secondary ecosystem. Ticketmaster's own apps and sites went barren — and fans were quietly being trained to stop checking them at all.
Platinum was the structural answer: a held pool of seats released incrementally at true market price. Artists set an intentionally fan-friendly floor; the tool decided when and how to release the rest. Internally, the only metric that mattered was Gross Ticket Value — and it lived or died on how fast specialists could read the market and act.
02 — Operational friction
Operational friction
The existing tool was a spreadsheet-style app — visually outdated, but burned into muscle memory. To price a single event, a specialist had to keep the pricing tool open in one tab and a live seat map on Ticketmaster.com in another, eyeballing inventory and toggling back to type changes. The workflow was a context-switch loop dressed up as a product.
The real challenge wasn't visual. Users were openly resistant to change — even change they needed. The redesign had to earn trust, not just ship.
03 — Systems thinking
Systems thinking
I reframed the specialist's day as a continuous GTV loop: scan the portfolio → spot an event drifting from market → open the map → adjust price or release inventory → watch the signal move. Every screen had to compress that loop, not decorate it.
Two surfaces carried the whole product: an Event List built for fast triage across hundreds of concurrent events, and an Event Detail page where the seat map and pricing controls finally lived in the same room.
04 — Key decisions
Key decisions
Collapse the two-tab workflow
Pulled the live seat map directly into the Event Detail page. Specialists could now select by section, row, or individual seat and adjust price or hold status without ever leaving the tool.
Trend graphs over number columns
Replaced the three-number price history column with a sparkline. Product and engineering aligned immediately — but users clung to the old columns. We shipped without the graph, then ran a two-month soft campaign with power users until adoption flipped.
Triage-first Event List
Restructured the list around 'which event needs me right now,' not 'every field we have.' Visual hierarchy, status, and price-movement indicators moved to the front; raw data moved to drill-in.
Change management as a design surface
Treated rollout itself as part of the design. Daily PM check-ins, recurring sessions with key users, and staged feature releases — the UI shipped in waves the users could absorb.
05 — Workflow architecture
Workflow architecture
Specialist GTV loop
Scan portfolio
event list triage
Open event
integrated detail
Read the map
section · row · seat
Price / release
in-context controls
Watch signal
trend feedback
06 — Outcome
Outcome & metrics
The redesigned tool is live across internal pricing teams and drove a meaningful, sustained lift in Gross Ticket Value on Platinum inventory — the metric the entire program was built to move. Specialists cover more events with less friction, and the artist-friendly floor price stays intact for fans on the primary on-sale.
Just as importantly, the team that resisted the redesign the hardest now defends it. The line graph they rejected for two months is the feature they ask not to lose.
Systems insight
Design the business metric
GTV wasn't a dashboard tile — it was the shape of the workflow. Every screen earned its place by shortening the loop from signal to release.
Operational friction
Two tabs is a product gap
Whenever users keep a second window open to do their job, the missing surface is the design brief.
Business impact
Rollout is a design decision
Shipping the graph late wasn't a compromise — it was the design. Adoption is a UX problem, not a comms problem.
Supporting artifacts
Selected artifacts
Before
The legacy Client Center. Specialists worked out of this dense, table-heavy view in one tab while keeping a live seat map open in another — toggling constantly between the two to price a single event.
Explorations
Exploration — pulling the live seat map directly alongside the Platinum inventory list, with price chips rendered in-context on the map.
Event list row states — designing for blank, hover, partial, and ideal data so triage holds up across the full lifecycle of an event.
Event Details exploration — bulk selection, inline analyst notes, and price / status controls operating against the same seat map.
Final designs
Pricing analysis — the new triage surface. Specialists scan the portfolio by inventory state, weekly sales trend, and revenue at a glance, then click any row to reveal the associated seat map.
Event Detail — clicking a row from the pricing analysis reveals the integrated seat map in the same tab. Specialists select by section, row, or individual seat and adjust price or hold status without ever leaving the tool.
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Posted Jun 26, 2026
Redesigned Ticketmaster's internal pricing tool to improve GTV and enhance user experience.
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