Case Study

Global Scaling & Growth Infrastructure

Product Pronto Pilates
Role Senior Product Designer & Strategic Partner
Focus Market Expansion, Growth Loops, BI
Growth Market Expansion Localization Churn Mitigation Business Intelligence
Section 01

Strategic Context / A Three-Sided Ecosystem

Pronto Pilates is a high-growth fitness platform operating across Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. The product spans three distinct surfaces — a consumer Web App, a Mobile App, and an Admin Dashboard used by studio managers — each with its own users, workflows, and business logic that had to stay synchronised.

In this engagement, I functioned as a strategic partner to the Head of Technology, not just as a designer executing briefs. The remit was broad: translate complex business requirements into a scalable product roadmap, own the end-to-end experience across all three platforms, and make decisions that held up under engineering constraints.

The Setup
Working with a lean engineering team meant that every design decision carried a real development cost. Scope wasn't just a design concern — it was a resource allocation decision. Product choices had to be justified across three platforms simultaneously, and the cost of getting it wrong was amplified at every layer.
Ecosystem diagram Visual to add → Web / Mobile / Admin three-sided model
Section 02

Market Expansion / Solving the Local-to-Global Pivot

The primary business objective was moving from a regional AU/NZ player to a global brand. The blocker was architectural: the existing platform was built around Australian and New Zealand GST — a tax-inclusive pricing model baked into the billing logic, onboarding flows, and membership structures. That made it incompatible with US market expectations and compliance requirements by design.

The brief from the Director of Technology was deliberately open-ended.

"Figure out what needs to change." — That's a product brief, not a design brief.

That framing mattered. It wasn't a request for a reskin — it was an invitation to map the full scope of the problem. I worked through the localization requirements end-to-end: tax-exclusive pricing logic, regional billing compliance, and a dynamic signup funnel that detects user location and applies the correct model automatically — without adding friction or increasing drop-off.

The Blocker
AU/NZ GST tax-inclusive pricing was baked into platform architecture. Every billing flow, price display, and membership structure assumed a single tax model — fundamentally incompatible with US billing norms and compliance requirements.
The Solution
A dynamic onboarding funnel that detects user region and applies the correct pricing logic at the point of signup. Compliant for the market, invisible to the user — de-risking US market entry without a platform rewrite.
Localization flow diagram Visual to add → dynamic signup funnel by region
Section 03

Growth & Referral / Lowering CAC Through Community

Paid social has a ceiling — and a cost. To scale efficiently, the business needed to reduce Customer Acquisition Cost by activating the one asset it already had: a growing, engaged member community. The challenge was building a referral system that didn't feel like a referral system.

Referral Architecture
Designed the Member Invite and Free Trial system from definition through to delivery. The critical insight wasn't the mechanics of a referral — it was the context. Instead of a generic share link, the flow allowed members to invite friends directly into a specific class they were already attending. The referral carried intent: "Come to this class, with me, at this time." That context is the difference between a cold link and a warm conversion.

Alongside the referral flow, I collaborated on the requirements for Referral Tracking Reports — giving the business real visibility into trial-to-paid conversion rates and which referral sources were actually driving revenue. Growth loops only compound when you can measure them.

Referral flow diagram Visual to add → class-specific invite flow
Section 04

Retention & Business Intelligence / From Guessing to Knowing

As the user base grew, the business lacked visibility into why members were leaving. Not all churn is equal — a billing failure and a deliberate cancellation require entirely different product responses. Treating them the same means misallocating recovery efforts and missing the signal in the noise. The goal was to transition from guessing to knowing.

One of the clearest interventions was the Membership Pause feature. Rather than forcing a binary choice between staying and cancelling, members could pause during travel, injury, or life disruption — and return without friction. It's a retention mechanism dressed as a service improvement, and it recovers revenue that would otherwise be lost permanently.

Involuntary Churn
Isolating billing failures from active cancellations — two fundamentally different problems requiring different recovery responses.
Reactivation Trends
Tracking which incentives and re-engagement strategies actually brought former members back — closing the loop on winback campaigns.
At-Risk Revenue
An Overdue Members report giving studio managers an immediate view of failing payments, enabling proactive recovery before churn becomes permanent.
Impact
6+ critical business reports delivered, giving leadership real-time visibility into ROI, member lifecycle health, and product performance across markets.
Reporting engine Visual to add → admin BI dashboard screenshot
Section 05

Operational Excellence / Building for Speed Without Debt

With a lean engineering team, velocity and quality are in constant tension. Every feature that ships fast but creates inconsistency across platforms becomes a tax on future development. The answer wasn't to slow down — it was to build the foundations that let the team move faster without accumulating debt.

Design System
Established a Figma-to-code design system that reduced design-to-dev handoff friction and maintained feature parity across the Web App, Mobile App, and Admin Dashboard. When business logic updated on one surface, the system ensured consistency across all three — without every change requiring a full audit.

Not every good idea deserves immediate prioritisation. When the Studio Discovery feature was on the table, the case for it wasn't made on design merit alone — it was made on operational ROI. I demonstrated how it would reduce the volume of manual support tickets, translating a UX improvement into a direct reduction in operational overhead. That's the framing that moves roadmaps.

What This Case Study Demonstrates
Scaling a live product across markets and platforms requires more than design craft. It requires localization strategy, growth loop architecture, churn tooling, BI reporting, and a design system that holds the whole thing together — all delivered as a strategic partner operating at the product layer, not just the design layer.