A three-sided ecosystemThree surfaces, one lean engineering team
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 has its own users, workflows and business logic, and all three had to stay synchronised.
I worked as a strategic partner to the Head of Technology rather than a designer executing briefs. The remit was to translate complex business requirements into a scalable roadmap, own the experience across all three platforms, and make decisions that held up under engineering constraints.
The local-to-global pivotGST was baked into the architecture
The business objective was moving from a regional AU/NZ player to a global brand. The blocker was architectural. The platform was built around Australian and New Zealand GST, a tax-inclusive pricing model baked into billing logic, onboarding flows and membership structures. That made it incompatible with US market expectations and compliance requirements by design.
Figure out what needs to change. The brief from the Director of Technology. That's a product brief, not a design brief.
That framing mattered. It was not a request for a reskin, it was an invitation to map the full scope of the problem. I worked the localisation requirements end to end: tax-exclusive pricing logic, regional billing compliance, and a dynamic signup funnel that detects location and applies the correct model automatically, without adding friction or increasing drop-off.
AU/NZ GST tax-inclusive pricing baked into platform architecture. Every billing flow, price display and membership structure assumed a single tax model, fundamentally incompatible with US billing norms.
A dynamic onboarding funnel that detects region and applies the correct pricing logic at signup. Compliant for the market, invisible to the user, and no platform rewrite required.
Lowering CAC through communityA referral system that doesn't feel like one
Paid social has a ceiling and a cost. To scale efficiently the business needed to reduce customer acquisition cost by activating the asset it already had: a growing, engaged member community.
Alongside the flow itself, I collaborated on requirements for referral tracking reports, giving the business real visibility into trial-to-paid conversion and which sources actually drove revenue. Growth loops only compound when you can measure them.
From guessing to knowingNot all churn is the same problem
As the user base grew, the business had no visibility into why members were leaving. A billing failure and a deliberate cancellation require entirely different product responses. Treating them the same means misallocating recovery effort and missing the signal in the noise.
The clearest intervention was the membership pause. Rather than a binary choice between staying and cancelling, members could pause during travel, injury or life disruption and return without friction. It is a retention mechanism dressed as a service improvement, and it recovers revenue that would otherwise be gone permanently.
Isolating billing failures from active cancellations, two different problems needing two different recovery responses.
Tracking which incentives actually brought former members back, closing the loop on winback campaigns.
An overdue members report giving studio managers an immediate view of failing payments, enabling recovery before churn is permanent.
Six-plus critical business reports delivered, giving leadership real-time visibility into ROI, member lifecycle health and product performance across markets.
Speed without debtVelocity and quality are in constant tension
Every feature that ships fast but creates inconsistency across platforms becomes a tax on future development. The answer was not to slow down. It was to build the foundations that let the team move faster without accumulating debt.
Not every good idea deserves immediate prioritisation. When studio discovery was on the table, the case was not made on design merit. It was made on operational ROI: I showed how it would reduce manual support ticket volume, translating a UX improvement into a direct reduction in overhead. That is the framing that moves roadmaps.