Launching a SaaS Tool for Managing Staff, Spaces, and Expenses
Turning a spreadsheet-based process into a scalable, sales-ready SaaS solution
2021
Delivered to Market
Bowlero – a large nationwide entertainment chain – used complex spreadsheets for managing their business processes.
While at Launch Consulting, I helped them transform this spreadsheet solution into software they could sell to similar multi-location service businesses. Eventually this work turned into a startup – Bellum.ai – and multi-year venture.
At the time of this project, Bowlero was in the process of going public through a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC). This initiative was part of their broader strategy to diversify revenue streams in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Key Outcomes
Transformed intimidating spreadsheets into an approachable experience
Bowlero relied on a fragile and un-intuitive system to manage national operations. Wwhile the business processes were sophisticated, the software was not.
An approachable solution empowered more employees to think strategically.
Expanded work contract by over $500k through innovative concepts
By working to deeply understand the business needs and user desires, I contributed conceptual work that sold Bowlero's stakeholders on an extended contract with Launch.
This expansion let us build a more powerful product.
Built the MVP of a new SaaS platform and multi-year startup venture
This project started as an internal product codenamed "Quantitative Management Solutions" (or QMS for short).
The software we developed eventually turned into a separate startup entity with its own staff.
Design Process
Understand the business
As a project that mixed service design and UX design, I needed to have a clear grasp of the business
Clarify audience / value
This project was targeted at serving a wide range of employees – so audience definition was necessary
Solution design
Work from concept to high fidelity crafting proposed experiences and interfaces to accommodate them.
Research Methodology
Working alongside a UX researcher, I conducted interviews with current employees from the SVP to individual center manager level to understand their current approach to operational management.
Mid project, I tested concepts for individual components of the solution, as well as end-to-end prototype flows. As concepts developed, we reviewed work internally with project stakeholders.
As the project became more 'real', we moved into usability testing focused on specific tasks, testing early product builds with stakeholders, and UAT criteria construction and evaluation to ensure contractual and technical goals were met.
Understanding the Business
300+ Bowling and Entertainment Centers
Bowlero, a billion-dollar company that operates over 300 bowling and entertainment centers nationwide, is larger than well-known names like Dave and Buster’s.
Entertainment Centers in Peer Sets
To ensure consistent scaling of management decisions, Bowlero organizes its entertainment centers into peer sets based on trailing twelve-month (TTM) revenue.
Centers with similar performance metrics are compared within these groups. For example, the subcategory of centers under $1 million in revenue may include 10 bowling centers, all of which would be compared to the top center's revenue performance.
Peer Sets Compared by Category
Each peer set is split into smaller subcategories based on P/L area – with a leaderboard to track success in each one. The main focus is on two areas: making more money (Revenue) and saving on costs (EBITDA).
Spread in Category Gamified as 'Opportunity'
For any center, they look at the difference between it and the leader in each category – and call that an “opportunity” for optimization. The sum of those total opportunities – across cost savings and revenue – is a total opportunity for the center.
This gamification of branch performance is the not so secret sauce of Bowlero’s success. Because opportunities are category-by-category, Bowlero can construct consistent playbooks for revenue and cost scenarios – and optimize those plays as they run them repeatedly.
Clarifying Audience & Value
Goal for Target Audience
Our goal was to take this manual-data-entry, spreadsheet intensive process that was intimidating to most individual branch managers, and build out something friendly and intuitive
Additionally, the project aimed to turn the more ad hoc, fuzzy decision making around tactics and layer in analytics, goal definition, success metric tracking, and eventually ML powered tactic suggestion
Finally, this solution needed to be flexible enough in nature that Bowlero (and later Bellum.ai) could treat it as a white-label solution for similar multi-location businesses
Two Fundamental Archetypes and Value Propositions
Managers of multiple entertainment centers – like district and regional leaders – focused on strategy.
Their time was spent gathering high-level insights, improving workforce management to reduce attrition and boost engagement, and targeting top-performing or struggling centers for the biggest impact.
Managers of single entertainment centers focused on specific tactics and daily operations.
Often overwhelmed by work demands, they needed quick access to key metrics. Lacking a business background they struggled with the complexity and fragility of the current spreadsheet solution.
Existing Tool: Powerful, Confusing, Fragile
For both single and multi-center managers, the existing approach to reviewing and managing metrics wasn't working. Built entirely within Excel, it had an amazing set of metrics and capabilities to quickly pivot data – but that power wasn't something most users were prepared to take advantage of. Most users were overwhelmed with the complexity.
The Excel spreadsheet based approach also had some serious issues with fragility and permissions – and frankly was scary for most managers to interact with for fear of deleting some important information.
As we observed managers attempt to navigate the existing set of tabbed, hyperlinked spreadsheets full of calculation fields, it became clear this was a UX that was more suited for fans of a Bloomberg terminal than entry level bowling alley managers. With such a strong operations muscle, a lot of great strategic insight was going to waste for want of a more intuitive experience.
Design Solutions
Metrics rolled up at a full-company level, category-by-category.
For company leadership, this serves as their first stop to get a pulse on what's happening.
A standardized metric layout and framework across entire geographic regions, districts within them, and specific centers.
Standardizing data presentation makes it easy to compare, share, and drill in and out.
A flexible ‘sandbox’ page for pivoting center metrics rolled up across a user-defined number of centers.
This is useful for on-the-fly analysis or viewing cohorts that didn't align to peer sets.
A flexible table for reviewing peer set performance across centers, filterable to various time periods
A multidimensional data view tracking revenue versus EBITAR, period-over-period across a peer set.
This visual sealed the deal on a SOW expansion due to the power it offered executives for quickly understanding direction of movement, amplitude, and trends at various strata
Task Management
An experience allowing center managers to add revenue or cost optimization tactics to a to-do list, including tactic start and end dates, minimum and maximum goals, and key checkup intervals.
This built the pipeline for ML-powered recommendations down the road, and provided key accountability and event tracking.
A multi-location-manager specific experience for viewing the to-do lists of various direct reports and assign tasks for completion
Outcomes and Lessons
Business Understanding
This project was like a micro-MBA for me – I learned a lot about the fundamentals of operational management firsthand from experienced business people, and the small and large choices that make up day-to-day.
From Zero to One
Building a startup’s MVP from the ground up and turning a spreadsheet into a true software platform was some of the most full-stack design experience I’d had to date.
Sales Support / Consultative Experience
I played an integral role in expanding the contract statement of work by over 30%, a crash course in understanding the mix of providing consultative value, supporting stakeholder ambitions, and selling a service for what it’s worth.
Strategic Direction Setting
With the MVP launch of this product, we set up the momentum and inertia for years worth of startup running and experimentation and built stakeholder confidence that their big idea was worth investing more in.