Padel is a popular sport in Europe, gaining recent traction in North America, and supported by the likes of Daniel Alfredsson from the NHL! Although it's such an easy sport to pick up, the little problem in Ottawa is that there is only 1 location that provides the facilities to support it.
The most enthusiastic racket players regularly seek out places and times to play between their busy schedules.
Players often book their favourite courts online and in advance for them and a large group of their friends.
Court bookings are populated into the web-based administration system, and high level statistics to show facility performance, such as orders placed, revenue over time, and average booking durations.
Interviewees indicated they prefer specific courts if they know the facility. It allows for players sensitive to their surroundings to conveniently choose their favourite region in the gym.
Emergencies or unsafe courts were not to be overlooked, so we prioritized the facility’s choice to adjust to time slots, and provide as much information to players on cancellation as possible.
Allowed custom facility notes to inform managers on rationale behind loss of profit
To avoid as much inconvenience as possible, time slots that were modified but not cancelled (pricing or time) allowed users to keep their booking, or initiate a free refund
While a solidified proof of concept has been designed and developed, a beta release and further testing is still needed.
Due to a constant turnover of team members in combination with low stakeholder engagement, more time was spent onboarding than decision making. Here are a few other challenges we faced.
Aligning the team with the feature roadmap was a challenge due to low stakeholder engagement. In the future a good practise is to prepare meeting formats and tabling non-essential discussions.
We scaled the MVP to fit the team's skillsets, but there was constant turnover. To progress, we deferred larger roadmap features requested by stakeholders to later phases.
