Feeling like a hot chick

At the end of September one of our sales managers closed a deal that took almost no time. Peter Selmer, who founded GolfNext in 2012, wrote about it on LinkedIn. The sales manager didn’t have to convince anyone. The club’s members had already done it. They’d used our kiosks at other golf clubs, then came home and asked their own club: “Why not here?”

I commented under the post that golfers asking their own club for GolfNext is the best signal there is. I’ve kept thinking about it since, and this post is the longer version of that comment.

The one everyone wants

So, the title. The hot chick in this story isn’t me. It’s the product.

GolfNext makes software that golf clubs run on, and the part golfers see most is the self-service kiosk: a digital reception that runs around the clock, so a player can pay a green fee, rent equipment or buy from the pro shop without anyone standing behind a counter. As far as we know, nothing else like it exists in golf.

Most software only gets noticed when it breaks. Nobody walks into a building and asks who made the door handles. But golfers use our kiosk at one club, and then they go to the next club and miss it. Then they ask for it. That’s what being attractive looks like for a product: people want it before anybody has pitched it to them.

Peter put the shift in one line: golfers now expect check-in to be fast and simple, and they notice when it isn’t.

What it does to me

The kiosk is something we make ourselves. Colleagues in-house build part of the hardware, and my other colleagues and I build the software that runs on it and everything around it. So when golfers ask for it by name, they’re asking for something we made, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a bit of that attraction rub off.

It’s a good feeling, and it does something to how I work. When you know people are asking for the thing you make, by name, you want to be worthy of it. A bug that would be a backlog item somewhere else stops being one. A screen that’s fine becomes a screen I’d like to be great. You start reasoning from the player standing at the kiosk at half past five in the morning, because that player is the one who’ll go home and tell their own club about it. Or won’t.

Nobody has to tell me to do my best on a product like that. I want to.

Staying attractive is daily work

Products don’t stay attractive by themselves. We work on it continuously, and most of it comes down to four things.

Easy to use. For the player at the kiosk, and for the staff behind the desk. When a PDF of ball codes that clubs print out started spilling onto two pages, it didn’t wait in a backlog for a month. It was fixed within the hour. Small things like that are the difference between a product people put up with and one they ask for.

Easy to integrate. Clubs already run other systems, and they shouldn’t have to choose between those and us. The easier we are to plug in next to what a club already has, the fewer reasons it has to say “not yet”.

Less dull manual work. Every physical device we have out there, kiosk screens, card terminals, ball dispensers, now joins with a 12-digit code typed in on site, and from then on gets its settings and updates from us. Nobody connects to a device and sets it up by hand anymore. The next step is a small web page where club staff set up a new device themselves, so replacing a broken one takes a parcel and a link instead of several phone calls. Nobody went into this job to type the same settings into the fortieth machine, and nobody at a club did either.

Open when everyone has gone home. This is the one that matters most to me. The kiosk is a reception that doesn’t close. When the last employee has locked up and driven home, a player can still turn up, pay a green fee and play. The club keeps earning outside opening times, and the golfer gets the same convenience they have everywhere else in their life. That only works if the product is reliable when there’s nobody on site to restart it.

And then there’s listening. When a club tells us something is a bug, we usually solve it the same day. Sometimes, though, the thing one club calls a bug is exactly what another club likes. Then we don’t pick a winner. We make it a setting, and each club decides for itself. Everybody stays happy, and club administrators stay in charge of their own setup instead of having to ask us to change it for them. A product that’s self-service for golfers should be self-service for the people running the club too.

Where it’s heading

None of this is about being a nice product for a handful of clubs. In August I wrote Road to glory, our plan for the platform underneath everything, and I said the ambition out loud there: we want this to be the platform the golf industry runs on. Every club, every range, every country that has both.

That post was about the engine: fewer languages, one shape for every repository, a codebase anyone on the team can open and be useful in. I also wrote that the engine can’t create the thing that makes the ambition realistic. Clubs who see the product are amazed by it, and that reaction is the asset. Peter’s Friday deal is that reaction, playing out in a sales meeting.

So the engine matters because of what it lets us do for the people standing in front of the screen. And for that, user experience comes first. Every decision starts from the person using it: the golfer at the kiosk before the first tee time, the staff member who has to explain something to a member, the administrator changing a setting at the end of a long day. If a feature is clever but makes any of them stop and think, it isn’t finished. The best compliment our product can get is that nobody notices it, right up until they’re at a club that doesn’t have it.

That’s the kind of ambition that keeps me going. Not just to grow, but to grow by being the thing people prefer.

Attractive is a promise

There’s a flip side, and I think it’s the important part.

Being the one everyone wants raises the bar. Members who compare clubs will compare us too, and a kiosk that’s frozen at half past five in the morning isn’t just a bug. It’s the moment someone stops asking “why not here?”. The attraction only lasts as long as the product keeps earning it.

That’s what the last part of my comment was about. “We will keep delivering” sounds like the kind of thing you write under a colleague’s post. I meant it as a promise. The sales team can only close deals that fast because golfers already like what they’ve used, and keeping it that way is my job.

It’s a nice job to have. Most days I’m just an engineer fixing a print layout or chasing a bug. But when golfers go home and ask their club for the thing we make, I’ll admit it: for a moment, I’m feeling like a hot chick. And there’s nothing more motivating than wanting to stay that way.