Super tech support 💻
The app that I wrote for my dad's social badminton club. V1 was released in July 2022. We just did an upgrade in Dec 2023. 🎄
My dad runs a paid membership based badminton social club 🏸. He looks after the weekly sign up process, organises bookings, members communication and manages the financials.
Last July, on his request I built a little Google form & sheet app to streamline his weekly process during my Sydney visit. This club has been running for over a decade. There were previous attempts to bring the sign up process online, but they either ended in burdensome admin for the organisers having to track via individual email replies; or a confusing web interface for the members. Perhaps it's due to my line of work, even though it was a rather simple program, I did some brief user interviews to understand the workflow, inefficiencies and pain points. Some may say it's an overkill, after all it's just a bunch of retirees playing badminton. There is nothing mission critical here. To me, this is a core part of the community’s healthy, active lives; my dad’s especially. That to me is invaluable. ❤️ As a product manager, there truly are no un-interesting jobs to be done and a different user segment from my professional work is always a challenge, therefore this deserved my attention and care.
There were two user groups I had to serve with these use cases:
The members, who are accustomed to a weekly sign up cadence and they are interested to know who else has signed up so they know if it would be a crowded session with long waiting times ⌛.
The admins, who are responsible for fee collection and reconciliation💰. Over time, the admins also adjust/ project bookings or recruit new/ casual members based on recent attendance.
No one in the community is particularly tech savvy. The admins would have to take over ownership and support of the code once I handed it over, so I needed to optimise for supportability.
The interface I chose were a Google form for sign up, which supported new bookings, cancellation and changes; and a Google sheet for viewing of current sign up status and an audit log for the admins. I used protected sheets to hide away what goes on behind the scenes which only the admins can access. This keeps the interface simple and user error limiting 🙅♀️.
The program itself didn’t take much time to write, as it only involved several formulae. I then had the help of my dad and another admin to run some tests, through which we uncovered and fixed a number of bugs. V1 was then released with my dad’s email announcement to the members. In the first weeks, I had to be on-call 📞 in case things went awry but it soon got on track smoothly.
During my most recent visit, my dad passed on some user feedback and observations. Namely, members occasionally run into typos and the program doesn't de-dup their entries and that some late bookings show up after the new week has kicked off. Given the sporadic nature of maintenance, I had completely forgotten about my code, but fortunately I jotted notes down earlier on to help me pick it back up quickly. In an hour or so, I completed an upgrade to address the above problems ✨.
A keen eyed member 🤨 noticed the changes immediately and even identified a bug! I was slightly embarrassed about the quality of my work, but felt an adrenaline rush nonetheless seeing that my program was so closely monitored and used. It reaffirmed the purpose of my effort.
In the following week I checked in with my dad to ensure nothing weird popped up, before I officially handed it back over.
I get a lot of inbound DMs asking me how to break into product management. One common frustration is folks find it hard to obtain their first hands-on experience. The reality is there are building opportunities literally everywhere you look, with everyone you talk to. Even something as simple or low tech as this example can serve as practice to train up your problem framing, user research, prioritisation, design, build, test muscles. All you need to do is ask and put your hand up 🖐️.
Thanks a lot for the great deed. Our honorary auditor praised the design of the financial sheet for making his work simple. Our rudimentary previous website had left much to be desired. The person who designed it boasted of being well-versed in coding and since we were a bunch of ignorant people on this matter, we could not challenge it.