Elite Personal Training Hybrid Platform
100+ Users in First Month
1 Year
Product Management, Stakeholder Management, Competitive Analysis, User Research, User Interviews
If you look around the fitness app industry, you'll find two large trends:
"AI powered" custom workouts
Preset follow along routines (Apple Fitness has a lot of follow along workout videos)
The competition in those two spaces was enormous. It seemed everyone and their brother wanted to convince someone else that they had the golden way to workout and a follow along plan that "guarantees" results. We decided to avoid these two approaches entirely for fear of blending in to an enormous crowd.
Therefore, we needed a different approach, which came fairly quickly once we decided to focus on Omar's existing strengths and how he became so successful: in person consultation and periodic training sessions supplemented with take home workouts and meal plans. This hybrid approach combined the best of in person experiences where a trainer can closely supervise your form and intensity with the cost savings and take home value of a custom program built by an elite trainer.
The hybrid approach also minimized the time a person was training with Omar and using his time. If we could also automate how he creates and assign workouts and meal plans, while simultaneously enabling trainers to digitally track their client's progress, we knew we had a great concept that would allow him (and other trainers) to make more money, support more clients, and have better quality.
Another point of differentiation for our product was that we focused a lot not just on workouts, but meal plans as well. From our research talking with elite fitness trainers and some of their successful clients, their resounding statements were that fitness success was 70% due to proper diet, and only 30% due to proper workout programming. So, if we actually wanted to help people succeed, we had to incorporate this into our designs and company mission.
Here's what we knew we needed to support at a VERY high level:
A trainer's profile
A place for clients to browse and choose their workout coach and pay through the app
A place for clients to build their own workouts, receive custom workouts from trainers
A place for clients to build their own meal plans, receive custom meal plans from trainers
A client profile that a trainers and clients can track progress with.
A messaging platform between client and trainer
What we were really looking at supporting could be condensed into the trainers functions and the client's functions. So, we mimicked this logical structure by having a client app and a dedicated trainer's app. This way we wouldn't be trying to shove so much functionality for different use cases into one app.
Once we made that decision, we did more intense competitive research and went feature by feature, looking for the best implementations of workout programs and diet programs (although there are significantly fewer diet program applications). From there we designed and then reviewed and tested those designs with both trainers and clients to make sure the process of setting up and interacting with workouts was as dummy proof as possible. Fitness coaches surprisingly weren't the most technological users, despite being relatively young, which was an interesting finding.
Lastly, to encourage PLG, we decided to make the base version of Beyond totally free for users. This means that users can build, track, and manage their workouts and meal plans for free using our system, but if they want professional guidance they'll pay the trainer directly and Beyond will take a small fee for facilitating the transaction.
Beyond Fit was a very unique experience for a very high profile client. Developing it, releasing it, and thinking through the entire product from A-Z was a great challenge for me. I was also a part time designer for this, and I really learned what a designer actually needs from PMs. I learned what specifics and context are useful, and what is just PM fluff to make them feel good about themselves that they sent something.
I worked with CTOs, learned how to better manage a product from start to finish, learned how to think multiple moves ahead and how things need to connect, and learned how to work with a CEO that is extremely time constrained.
Aside from product related things, I also got to record the custom workout videos, do a lot of research on exercise best practices, created the product's user facing website, informed the business' pricing and user acquisition strategy, and basically went far beyond a PM into being a complete cofounder.
