A group chat for decisions, a spreadsheet for costs, a notes app for the itinerary, screenshots of confirmations, and a separate RSVP link. Nothing is shared, nothing is live, and no single place answers "what's the plan, who's coming, who owes what, and what still needs doing."
From the product vision and PRD through UX, data architecture, and code. Orbit covers the full group planning lifecycle — plan, decide, coordinate, show up, and remember it.
Orbit started as a trips-and-events app. Watching how groups actually coordinate, most plans are smaller and more frequent: dinners, hangs, the same friends again next month. Orbit's next chapter removes the upfront choices and organizes Orbit around people instead of plan types.
Orbit is built around how groups actually plan — not how we wish they did. Different people want different surfaces.
I spent 4+ years at PwC shipping products for PepsiCo, Stellantis, FPL, and Acrisure. What Orbit gave me that client work didn't was complete ownership — of every product decision, every tradeoff, every line of code. There's no hiding from a bad call when you're the only one who made it.
The hardest lesson was scope. The first version of the feature list was much longer. Cutting the Gmail import — even though it was technically interesting — was the right call because the booking extraction from paste/screenshot solved 90% of the problem with a fraction of the auth complexity. Removing native animation libraries after they caused crashes taught me that stability is a feature, and invisible infrastructure is better product work than visible features.
The same lesson keeps showing up at a bigger scale. Cutting the trip/event fork removed a decision people had to make before they'd done anything, and it made room for Orbit to be about every kind of plan, not just travel. Progressive tabs beat upfront declarations: a plan should grow into what it needs instead of asking you to predict it. And groups get created after a plan, not before. Nobody wants to fill out an empty group form, but "plan something else with these five?" right after a good night out is an easy yes.
The thing I'm most proud of isn't any individual feature. It's that the architecture holds — 24 tables, row-level security on everything, realtime sync across all plan data, AI features brokered server-side with secrets never touching the client. It's built the way a real product should be built.