Walkrs: For Your Best Friend

Eight conversations with dog owners.

I started with interviews, eight dog owners, mix of first-timers and people on their second or third dog. The same complaints kept surfacing: finding a trustworthy walker is a WhatsApp lottery, vet appointments mean three phone calls and a calendar guess, and ordering food is split across half a dozen apps. The opportunity wasn't a single feature, it was the consolidation. One place where the recurring stuff actually lives.

Home and search, one entry point.

The product opens with a single discovery surface that holds every service track behind one search. Owners told me they didn't want to remember which app handled which thing, they wanted to type 'vet near me' or 'walker for tomorrow' and have the system route them. The home screen surfaces what's happening with their dog now; search opens up the full marketplace when they're shopping.

Grooming, medical, and product, same skeleton.

Beyond walking, the marketplace covers three more tracks: grooming, medical (vet care), and product (food + toys). Each gets its own destination but shares the same browse → detail → book → confirm skeleton, a single component library means the booking experience reads identically wherever the user lands. Only the inputs change: medical asks for symptoms and history, grooming for breed and coat, product for size and dietary needs.

Same shape, different specialist.

Every specialist, walker, doctor, groomer, gets the same profile structure: credentials, reviews, availability, services, price. The shape is identical so the user's mental model carries between tracks. Once you've booked a walker, booking a vet feels familiar.

Owner accounts, dog profiles.

The core architecture decision: an account is for a person, but the unit of action is a dog. Most owners I spoke to had more than one, different ages, different needs, different vets. Profiles cascade: Owner → one or many Dogs → bookings, medical history, and recommendations per dog. Every booking flow opens with 'which dog is this for?' and inherits the dog's profile downstream, vets see allergies, groomers see coat, the food shop sees age and weight.