The first version of the GolfTap tee-sheet was, in retrospect, a copy of Google Calendar with a green coat of paint. Hour rows, draggable blocks, a week view. It looked great in the demo and was completely wrong for how a golf club actually operates.
What we missed
Tee-times don’t slot like calendar events. They come in chunks of four, they’re separated by a club-specific interval (7, 8, 10, 12 minutes), and the things that matter to a manager — fill rate by day, group composition, no-show patterns — are invisible in a calendar view.
Worse: when something needs to change, the workflow isn’t “drag this event to a new time.” It’s “the 9:40 group can’t make it, can the 9:48 group move up?” That’s two seconds in the head and an awful interaction in a calendar UI.
The rewrite
We tore it out and rebuilt around the chunk-of-four. Each slot is a row with four player pills. Empty slots are visually heavier than filled ones (the opposite of calendars — you want to see gaps at a glance, because gaps are what you sell). Rebooking is two clicks: tap the new slot, tap “move here.”
Live metrics sit on top of the sheet: fill rate, member vs. visitor split, revenue pace versus the same day last year. Things committees ask about every week, now visible without a report being run.
What we’d do differently
Skip the calendar phase entirely. The lesson generalises: when you’re building software for an industry that already has its own muscle memory for the task, copy the muscle memory, not the closest mass-market analog.