GymGoer was built inside Techne HQ's R&D arm for founder Ryan Clarke. I ran product design and product management on it — strategy, interface, and the sequencing calls — with one UX designer and the development team, from March 2025 to launch in January 2026.
Two markets were failing each other. Getting four sessions in an unfamiliar city meant a contract, a joining fee and a waiver at a front desk, for a week of use. Meanwhile independent gyms had spare capacity every off-peak hour and no way to be discovered. Finding a casual-friendly gym still meant phone calls, manually checking hours, and negotiating a rate in person.
The guiding line came out of the early sessions: effortless access to the right gym at the right time. People didn't want more options, they wanted a clear path through the ones they had. And every failure I watched happened at the front desk rather than in the app — when the staff member hesitated on a check-in, the booking felt broken no matter how good the screens were.
So the product collapsed to three steps. Every screen answers exactly one question, and the one-tap booking carries the waiver, the payment and the door code in one confirmation — so nothing is left for the front desk to interpret.
The operator side shipped thinner than the traveller side. Gyms got capacity and revenue numbers but not the scheduling depth two of them asked for. For a marketplace that needed supply before it needed features that was the right order, but it cost us both of those chains in the first cohort.
Design the front desk, not just the app. The only thing that reliably broke the experience was a staff member who wasn't sure what a tap meant, and no amount of polish inside the product fixed that. On the next two-sided build the operator-side onboarding — a one-page card at the desk, an audible confirmation, a visible success state — gets designed before the consumer screens do.