Square

Scaling bookings to enter Fitness

Square Appointments was built around 1:1 services, used almost exclusively by beauty sellers. Entering fitness meant supporting capacity-based class sessions, a structurally different scheduling model the platform wasn't designed for.

The strategic direction was set. My job was to get there without breaking what already existed. Fitness spans a wide range of business types: personal trainers, gyms, health clubs, sports and recreation, and fitness studios, each with different operational needs. As a team, we aligned on designing for studios first. Studios run scheduled classes with fixed capacity and prepaid attendance, making them the clearest fit for Appointments and the highest-leverage starting point. My job was making sure that focus held in the actual design decisions — when tradeoffs came up, the studio was the reference point, not every fitness business at once.

That discipline shaped the core work: capacity-based availability, attendee tracking, and cancellation handling built around how studios actually operate, while remaining backwards compatible for existing sellers. The deeper challenge was reconciling scheduling, payments, and reporting so class revenue, attendance, and refunds behaved consistently, not as something frankensteined onto Appointments but as a natural extension of it.

When the product later refocused on Beauty, the fitness strategy wound down. But the capacity-based scheduling model remained, permanently expanding what the platform could support.