Hey everyone!
In Episode 15 of The Speakeasy, Bhavesh Vaghela, Chief Product, Technology & AI Officer at London Marathon Events, join us to walk us through where and how LME are placing their innovation bets, how they're incorporating AI into their workflows (rather than the customer experience), and their strategy for keeping the world’s biggest marathon, and the biggest annual one-day fundraising event, part of the conversation year-round.
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Snippets from The Speakeasy
The ballot is a funnel
1,338,544 people entered the ballot for next year's London Marathon. Bhavesh described watching the numbers come in as "a hockey stick kind of event.” As exciting as that is, now imagine building a product where the demand curve looks like that and your job is to disappoint most of the people who show up for it.
What strategies, products, or events, can you put in place to keep that disappointed majority engaged in your ecosystem after the rejection? For LME, their portfolio allows them to nudge them toward a charity place, or Brighton, or Frankfurt, or an event like Friday Night Lights, a 5K built entirely around music, lights and vibe, for people who would never in a million years sign up for 26.2 miles, but might just want to run somewhere fun on a Friday.
On the "Silent graveyards" that hold back innovation
We chat through what Bhavesh calls the “silent graveyard” - a collection of expensive AI projects that are slowly parked because nobody wants to explain the write-off internally. His actual filter for whether to build something is so simple it feels almost obvious: is this solving a real problem, or are we just excited that we technically can build it?
"If AI is your multiplier, you're going to get massive improvement in results. But if you don't have the subject matter expertise... you're going to get mediocre results at best." For Bhavesh, this is tangentially related to how he finds vendors. If a vendor comes to him promising the moon, it’s a red flag. He wants someone he can partner with to solve a real problem.
Trust is the whole model for fan-driven businesses
One in three people walking past stopped at a sponsor activation, and 80% of those people stayed more than five minutes. Versus industry benchmarks, this is genuinely strong engagement.
Bhavesh talks about how they capture insights on their audience’s behaviours/interactions, whilst also making time to take their direct feedback, all of which advises their product development roadmap. These insights are also pivotal in deciding how to best activate partners across their ecosystem - finding the right opportunities to integrate partners whilst maintaining the trust they’ve built over decades with their community.
What's also notable about LME is that its mission isn't a values-page platitude sitting separately from the product decisions. It is deliberately built into their product decisions - the on-ramps, the decision to keep entry prices affordable, as well as their discipline when it comes to AI.
How mature are sports organisations when it comes to technology?
Bhavesh's own comparison is that sport is roughly where banking was in 2008, comfortable on a captive audience right before the Monzos of the world showed up and reset what "good" was supposed to feel like.
And he has the experience to back up his claim. He started in defence, working on guided weapons and air-to-air missile systems, before moving through consultancy into banking, where he spent years running digital channels and apps for major banks. From there he went into cybersecurity, joining a startup building identity and authentication systems to stop fraud at scale, then into travel with Priority Pass, working out how to elevate an experience end-to-end rather than at a single touchpoint. Only after all of that did he land at LME.
This background has informed the strategy Bhavesh uses with LME, which is why it feels so far ahead of the industry curve.
So if you’re looking to build products and experiences that help you engage with your audience year-round, not just at your events, this conversation with Bhavesh is a must-listen.
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