Next-Gen Booking Vision
Open-ended projects either ship something real or die in a deck. I wasn't going to let this one die.
Open-ended projects either ship something real or die in a deck. I wasn't going to let this one die.
The booking flow was built for hair salons.
Our customers had outgrown it.
Boulevard started with salons and barbershops. In recent years, medspas became a growing share of the customer base. Stronger brands, loyalty programs, bigger marketing budgets driving new clients through the door.
The booking experience hadn't kept up. Clients arriving from an ad expected a polished journey. They got a form that felt like it was built in 2018.
Surface what customers actually complain about, not what we assumed.
Start from scratch. Ignore what everyone accepted without questioning.
Something concrete enough that every stakeholder can point to and say yes.
A vision no one acts on is just a deck. Keep stakeholders close enough that they feel ownership too.
Break the vision into self-contained projects and get them onto the roadmap.
We ran two parallel tracks: bottom-up to find what was broken, top-down to define what good should look like. Neither was enough on its own.
We pulled years of customer feedback and ran competitor analysis. Useful, but not the most revealing part. The real signal came from customers who had built their own booking experiences on top of our API. We could compare them side by side and had conversion data to back it up.
One finding stood out. Provider selection and date selection were separate steps. Pick a stylist, then find availability. If the stylist was booked out, you had to go back. Clients hit a wall and dropped off. A structural flaw that had been sitting there for years.
Ecommerce spent a decade perfecting the path from discovery to purchase. Self-care booking never got that memo. Businesses spend real money on awareness, then hand clients to a booking tool with no memory of what brought them there. Start over. Pick a service from scratch.
The drop in conversion is predictable. The strange part is that the whole industry accepted it as normal. No new model needed. Just apply one that already existed somewhere else.
Optimize for one business.
Accidentally break it for another.
We work with thousands of businesses. A change that lifts conversion for one can quietly hurt another. The real work: knowing where to let businesses customize and where a good default beats a setting.
Facial bars want maximum availability. Hair salon clients are loyal to their stylist. Massage clients often don't care about the person but do care about gender. Each of those changes the flow order.
I've seen vision projects stall before. Ambitious scope, not enough structure, and stakeholders stop trusting it. From day one, I shared a rough timeline with a clear deliverable at each checkpoint — and at each checkpoint, I tried to show something they didn't expect.
This case study covers the new client acquisition side only. Retention was a separate workstream — a whole other beast.
Series D round. The founder used the vision in his investor pitch. I presented the work at the Board of Directors meeting.
The vision didn't stay a deck. Phone-based client login, booking flow updates, and other projects spun directly out of it — actively being built across the company.
Product designer, 12 years in vertical SaaS. Now doing it with AI in the mix. Always looking for the next interesting problem.
