Scheduling for new parents
Productivity · Web · Calendar — We designed and built a niche scheduling web app that helps new parents plan childcare, work, and rest in one place — with low-friction sessions, a rich calendar, Google Calendar sync, exports that fit real life, and a headless CMS so marketing and SEO can scale alongside the product.
Client & context
- Client: Confidential — parenting and productivity startup (named attribution omitted for confidentiality).
- Product: A web scheduling experience aimed at new parents, with emphasis on time blocking across childcare, work, sleep, and personal time.
- Engagement: End-to-end product engineering — interactive product UI, API integration, and editorial stack aligned with growth and SEO.
Details are summarized at a level appropriate for public sharing; metrics, screenshots, and trademark use require client approval.
The challenge
New parents often juggle fragmented calendars: feeds, sleep, work blocks, and partner handoffs rarely appear in one coherent view. Generic calendar tools are not tuned to parenting workflows, and many products add friction with heavy signup before value.
The product needed to:
- Feel immediate — session-based use, with paths for beta and full accounts.
- Support real scheduling UX: drag-and-drop, multiple views, and clarity when life gets messy (for example overlapping blocks).
- Connect to ecosystems users already rely on (for example Google Calendar).
- Offer takeaway artifacts (PDF and ICS) for printing, sharing, or importing elsewhere.
- Scale content and SEO with a proper publishing layer (blog and marketing), not only the SPA.
Our approach
We treated this as a focused vertical SaaS: one primary persona (new parents), one core loop (build and adjust an honest weekly plan), and a clear path from anonymous try to engaged user.
Technically, we favored a modern React SPA for the interactive calendar, a versioned REST API for sessions, events, and integrations, and a headless CMS for editorial content and brand storytelling — so product and marketing could evolve without blocking each other.
What we built
Core product (web app)
- Homepage and discovery with routes for schedule templates to reduce blank-page anxiety.
- Session-guided flow from start through configuration, full calendar experience, day-focused view, and export step.
- Calendar built on FullCalendar with drag-and-drop (including common React DnD patterns) and recurrence support (for example rrule integration).
- Overlap awareness so conflicting blocks stay visible in the UI — not silently stacked.
- Predefined activity categories plus custom activities persisted per session via the API.
- Export and print using PDF-oriented tooling so schedules leave the browser as documents people actually use.
- Google Calendar: OAuth URL, callback, sync, and disconnect flows wired to the backend.
- Accounts and growth: beta and full signup and login, OTP, profile updates, feedback capture, mailing list endpoint, and push token registration where notifications are in scope.
- Polished UX: Radix primitives, Tailwind, motion for guided flows, onboarding tour patterns, toasts and dialogs, tables and charts where needed.
- Internationalization for broader reach; PWA-oriented patterns (manifest and service worker) for installable, mobile-friendly use.
Content and brand
- Headless CMS with a custom theme so the team can run a blog and marketing pages with server-rendered SEO benefits alongside the SPA.
Platform
Deployment aligned with a documented Node hosting story (for example Express where applicable), reverse proxy, process manager, and MongoDB for application data — adjusted to whatever the client runs in production.
Outcomes & value
We only state what we can stand behind without private metrics. Optional additions when approved: beta signups, session creation rate, export usage, Google Calendar connection rate, Core Web Vitals, or interview quotes.
- Shipped a differentiated niche product in a focused search space with a clear roadmap for SEO and content.
- Reduced friction with anonymous and session-first usage while keeping a path to beta and full accounts and calendar sync.
- Unified planning and publishing: the app for behavior, the CMS for story and organic growth.
Building a calendar-heavy
or vertical SaaS product?
Sessions, templates, integrations, and exports — we can help you ship a cohesive product and content story.