A product team of one became a full product org across iOS, Android, web, and B2B - and the work it shipped helped raise a $10M Series B.
I joined Reserve the week it launched. Day one, the product team was me.
Reserve was a demand-based restaurant reservation platform backed by Expa, and it had shipped its MVP with almost no user validation. The model asked diners to request a table and wait, sometimes up to 48 hours, in a world where people get agitated when a confirmation takes longer than five seconds. On the other side of the marketplace, restaurants would not hand over their inventory to a startup with no proven demand. Both sides of the business had the same problem: trust.
The first job was not design. It was credibility. I rebuilt the company's feedback process, trained the operations team to run valid usability testing, and put research in front of the board. Within months we had earned autonomy, and I had hired the team.
Then we attacked both sides of the trust problem.
On the consumer side, research kept surfacing the same finding: diners did not understand requests, but they understood people. So we rebuilt the request flow as a conversation, mirroring what a diner would say to a concierge on the phone. Comprehension and willingness to wait improved dramatically. We did not invent the behavior. We productized it.
On the restaurant side, we built a full inventory management system to replace the tools operators already distrusted. The hardest part was the seating algorithm. Experienced operators shuffle reservations like Tetris players, and no spec was going to capture that. So we made it literal: a wall-sized grid, reservations on post-its, and real operators showing us their moves while we wrote down the rules. The engineering team had a working proof of concept two sprints later.
Two years in, a team of one had become a product organization, and an unvalidated MVP had become an ecosystem: a rebuilt iOS app, a native Android app, a responsive web platform, a booking widget, and a B2B system restaurants actually trusted. The work culminated in a $10M Series B.
Every pattern I rely on now showed up here first. Diagnose before prescribing. Earn trust before asking for autonomy. Watch what experts do and build the system that does it with them. The scale at Disney is a thousand times larger. The pattern is the same.