In the latest episode of Build to Succeed, Michael Gyarmathy, Staff Software Engineer at the PGA of America, shares his journey from consulting to leading digital product development in the golf industry. With a strong focus on customer obsession, iterative development, and scalable technology, Michael discusses how his team is transforming the golf experience through digital innovation.
Michael has leveraged his engineering mindset— and transformed from a non-golfer to a fully dedicated player— to better understand the customer journey. His team’s work on PGA Coach, a platform designed to help teaching professionals modernize their business operations, showcases how digital tools can streamline workflows and enhance customer engagement.
Customer Obsession: The Foundation of Great Products
Michael emphasizes that building impactful digital experiences starts with deeply understanding the customer. At the PGA of America, his team took the time to study how golf coaches manage their businesses, leading to the development of PGA Coach—a platform that simplifies scheduling, payment collection, and communication.
At the same time, Michael draws insightful parallels between software engineering and golf, emphasizing that both demand continuous improvement. Just as golfers refine their swings, engineers must constantly adapt their skills to evolving technologies and user needs.
A key element of the team’s success is self-immersion in the customer journey. Even though not all team members are golfers, they actively engage with the sport to better understand their users. By experiencing golf firsthand, attending coaching sessions, and interacting with the PGA members, they gain valuable insights that directly inform product development. This deep connection to the customer experience ensures that their digital solutions genuinely meet the needs of the community they serve.
Moving from Consulting to Product Ownership
Michael’s background in consulting gave him a broad foundation in problem-solving across industries, but he found himself wanting greater ownership over the products he built. This desire led him to the PGA of America, where he could directly shape the digital experiences being created.
The PGA of America leverages Flutter to create multi-platform applications that ensure consistent, scalable experiences for users across devices. This approach reduces development redundancy and accelerates feature deployment.
The PGA Coach team also follows an iterative, hypothesis-driven approach to building features: instead of investing months into development, they run experiments and prototypes to validate ideas before committing significant resources.
They embrace a Shape Up-inspired methodology that prioritizes outcomes over rigid processes. This approach fosters an empowered engineering culture, where teams self-organize and take ownership of their work.
"At the core of a product development squad is a product triad—product manager, designer, and engineer. Together, they identify opportunities, define solutions, and execute on development" - Michael Gyarmathy
Building a Startup Culture in a Legacy Organization
Despite working for a 100+ year-old organization, Michael’s team operates with a startup mentality, using experimentation, rapid iteration, and cross-functional collaboration to drive product innovation.
Reach Out
Whether you're an engineer, product leader, or business strategist, this conversation is packed with valuable takeaways on how to build user-focused, scalable digital products.
At Very Good Ventures (VGV), we believe in building technology that empowers businesses. Michael’s insights reinforce the importance of customer-driven development, multi-platform solutions, and lean experimentation—all core principles that we apply to our work.
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