2021 Q1 StrengthPortal retrospective: Mindbody partner store and core feature enhancements

by Matt McGunagle

Headed into the new year our team was excited to start building new features and tools on top of all the platform upgrades we had added in 2020. Looking back at the last three months it's easy to see that we are starting to earn dividends with development velocity for the investments we made.

First and foremost, we were incredibly excited to announce that we are now live on the Mindbody Partner store. After announcing our supported integration in 2020 we continued to work hard to introduce ourselves to Mindbody fitness businesses, run pilots at gyms and studios, and successfully convert these pilots into long-term partnerships. This work resulted in our company reaching the requirements required to go live on the Mindbody partner store which is a huge stamp of approvol for us as a company. In the next few months we will be announcing several long-term partnerships we've built with multi-location Mindbody fitness customers.

As an extension of our customer growth with Mindbody customers we've been continuing to work on improving our Open organization settings and support. To break this down further, here are the two settings we've built out support for within StrengthPortal:

  • Classic: Classic is a good fit for health clubs and gyms that manage a classic personal training structure. These customers will usually focus on delivering high-quality in-person 1on1 personal training and have the following user roles at each location: Fitness manager, personal trainers, and clients. The key distinction is that each personal trainer will have a client roster that only they work with. When a trainer-client relationship is made the trainer can view that client within their client management list on our web and mobile apps. For any workout programs they enroll to a client only the trainer can edit the program and track the workouts. Managers can view all trainer and client profiles and data to collaborate with their trainers with the intention of delivering the highest quality service possible, but the trainer-client have their own special relationship.

  • Open: Open is a good fit for personal training gyms and studios that focus on deliverng high-quality programming and training as a team instead of just a single trainer. What this means in our software platform is that if we turn on Open settings and permission for a customer that every trainer will automatically have access to every client with view and edit permissions for their programs. This is a completely open system. To support this collaborative effort we've added UX to support traceability across the platform. With any workout program enrolled, workout tracked, or note added to a client profile you can clearly see who did what and what time to support. Open org is the perfect fit for fitness businesses who leverage teamwork to make the dream work :)

If you're interested in learning more about Classic vs Open within StrengthPortal please don't hesitate to schedule a call to walk through the platform with us.

In addition to the Mindbody integration and Open improvements we also released the following updates:

  • Team and personal workout session templates: In addition to team and personal workout program templates that can be re-used to save time programming we've extended this concept even further to workout sessions. Now, as an organization you can create and manage a list of workout sessions that any trainer on your team can add to any program to save time. Additionally, personal trainers can also create a list of their own workout sessions to add to any program. This is one of those features were the value really starts to compound with the more content that's added to an account.

  • Notes 2.0: Our client notes feature on the StrengthPortal web app hadn't been updated since 2018 so we took that opportunity to rebuilt the tool from scratch to add even more value than before. The new tool, available in the client profile - notes tab, allows for trainers and training teams to add notes with rich text editing and tags. These tags can also be added to specific exercises to be viewed while tracking a client on the floor. This flow was built to support the use case where a trainer is training clients back to back and needs important context to deliver the right type of training for the client they are training at that moment. Worth noting, we do have plans to extend this feature to the mobile app later this year.

  • Data visualization: Similar to our client notes feature we hadn't worked on the client profile - data visualization section on the StrengthPortal web app since 2018. We wanted to spend the time to improve this because it's a key step in the trainer and client experience within StrengthPortal. After a trainer works hard to write an optimal workout program and meets with the client session after session to track the workouts they want to see the progress they are making! In our rebuild we added the following to help with this use case: New charting tools to better visualize total volume tracked, vizualize multiple exercises volume, and the ability to view multiple rep max's for an exercise all over a specified time range. The end result is night and day with what we had before.

As always, thank you for all the feedback and support to help us continue to improve our platform so we can continue to delivery a high-quality experience. We have some exciting stuff on the way coming in Q2 of 2021, stay tuned!