Company
CourtReserve
Growing a sports platform from 900K to 1.2M active users
Role
Head of Product, Player Experience
Overview
At CourtReserve, I led Product Experience across product management and design, helping evolve the company from a club-management platform into a broader player ecosystem.
The opportunity was bigger than improving individual workflows. CourtReserve had strong adoption among clubs, but the player experience was fragmented and largely transactional. We saw an opportunity to connect players, facilities, bookings, and discovery into a more cohesive network while improving the core product experience along the way.
I connected customer insight, product strategy, design, and delivery around that opportunity while helping the team move faster from insight to validated product.
Metrics
1.2
M
Monthly active users up from 900K
33
%
User adoption increase
10
%
Increase in Booking Conversion
The Opportunity
CourtReserve had become an important operating platform for racquet and paddle clubs, but most of the product had been built around the needs of facilities rather than the broader player journey.
Players could book courts, register for events, and interact with individual clubs, but their experience was still largely tied to each organization. That created an opportunity to think beyond club management and toward a network that could help players discover places to play, connect with programs and communities, and engage across the CourtReserve ecosystem.
The challenge was not simply to design a new consumer product. It was to identify where player value and business value overlapped, improve the existing experience, and create a foundation that could scale across a growing network.
”What if CourtReserve helped players decide where, when and with whom to play?
My Role
As the leader of Product Experience, I was responsible for both product management and product design. I worked across customer research, product strategy, experience design, prioritization, prototyping, and delivery, partnering closely with engineering and company leadership.
My focus was on three things:
- Understanding where the current player journey was breaking down
- Defining the product strategy for a broader CourtReserve network
- Improving how quickly we could move from customer insight to validated, working experiences
AI-Enabled product development
AI as an accelerant across the entire process
I used AI throughout the product development lifecycle, not as a standalone step, but as a layer that helped the team move faster from insight to working product.
AI-assisted workflows helped synthesize research and behavioral data, explore product concepts, generate and refine experience directions, and move quickly from ideas into functional prototypes. Those prototypes gave us something tangible to evaluate earlier with customers, stakeholders, and engineering before committing to full production development.
The result was a tighter feedback loop between research, strategy, design, and implementation, reducing the distance between identifying an opportunity and putting a validated experience in front of users.
From Product Strategy to Player Experience
Research and behavioral data pointed to a broader player need than simply completing a booking. Players were trying to answer a sequence of questions:
Where can I play? What’s available? Is it right for me? What does it cost? Can I book it now?
That reframed the experience around discovery, evaluation, and conversion rather than individual club workflows. The result was a network experience designed to help players move seamlessly from exploring options to taking action.
Making the entire ecosystem discoverable
Explore the map
Players can explore the footprint of the CourtReserve network–filtering by sport, availability, activity type, court surface, and proximity.
Evaluate with confidence
Real-time availability and transparent pricing help players evaluate facilities and programs before they commit.
Convert seamlessly
Book a court, join a club, or purchase a pass directly–without leaving the CourtReserve experience.
One network across devices
A consistent experience anywhere
The same discovery model extends to mobile, allowing players to explore, evaluate and book on the go.
Outcomes
Within approximately six months, the Player Network grew from 900,000 to 1.2 million monthly active users, a 33% increase.
Customer-centered improvements informed by behavioral analytics also increased booking conversion by approximately 10%.
More importantly, the work established a new strategic direction for CourtReserve: moving beyond club-management software toward a connected consumer network built around the player journey and capable of linking players with clubs, courts, programs, and opportunities to play.
