Ezequiel Rodriguez — Agentic Product Designer
BookingChic: End-to-end booking ecosystem for a luxury day spa
Role: Product Designer + PM duties · Timeline: 2024–2025 · Team: 3 developers, general manager
BookingChic is a custom SaaS booking ecosystem for a luxury day spa in Australia: a web management platform for staff and a customer mobile app for booking, purchasing, and rewards. It is one system with two connected experiences, where a decision on one side changes what is possible on the other.
The problem
The spa ran scheduling, promotions, rewards, and product sales on four separate third-party tools. Staff worked across all of them, and customers got none of the premium experience the brand was selling in the room.
Business platform (web)
For managers and staff: one place to run bookings, services, and promotions. I translated user stories into a requirements matrix, surfaced edge cases early, prioritized the calendar module as the foundation everything else hangs off, and validated each module with stakeholders before moving forward.
Customer mobile app
For frequent spa customers: appointment booking, product and gift card purchases, rewards and point redemption, VIP subscriptions, and offers. The UI breaks mobile convention on purpose. Serif typography and a custom palette carry the luxury brand, and user testing confirmed people could still read it.
Designing both sides of one system
Business configurations shape what customers can see and book; customer behavior shapes how managers configure services and promotions. Designing both sides in parallel put the trade-offs between flexibility, simplicity, and usability on the table while they were still cheap to change.
Challenges & solutions
- Designer and PM at once — Challenge: No dedicated PM to manage scope and priorities. Solution: Structured documentation, clear task breakdowns, and regular check-ins kept the team aligned.
- Non-traditional mobile UI — Challenge: Luxury branding choices challenged standard mobile conventions. Solution: Strong visual hierarchy, high contrast, and user testing maintained usability.
- Rewards integration — Challenge: Real-time synchronization across web and mobile. Solution: Close collaboration with backend development ensured consistency and reliability.
The outcome
The web platform is live in production and the mobile app is built and waiting on launch, replacing the third-party patchwork with one system. With no dedicated PM on the project, I also owned priorities, documentation, and developer alignment.
- 4 operational areas unified in one system
- 2 connected experiences, web + mobile
- 3 developers aligned, no dedicated PM
Key takeaways
- Designing both sides in parallel exposed the trade-offs while they were still cheap
- Without a PM, the requirements matrix was the only thing keeping scope honest
- Every setting a manager can change is a screen a customer will eventually see
- Serif type on mobile survived user testing; the assumption that it would not did not
All work · Contact ezecrodriguez22@gmail.com