The best pre-shot plan in the world is worthless if you have to leave the screen you are standing on to read it. That was quietly true in our own app for a while: the app built a real hole-by-hole plan - a club, a playing yardage, an aim point for every shot - and then hid it one tab away from the exact moment you needed it, which is the moment you are standing over the ball entering your score. We fixed that. The plan now sits on the scoring pad itself.
What's Happening
Here is what the plan actually is, so the feature is not a mystery. For each hole, the app works out a recommended way to play it: which club to hit, the yardage to play it as, and where to aim - laid out shot by shot from the tee to the green. That is the game plan. It has been part of the app for a while.
The problem was where it lived. On the Score tab - the screen you spend the entire round on - the scoring pad takes the whole first viewport by design, so you are not hunting for buttons while you are trying to log a bogey. Good instinct, wrong result: it also meant the game plan stayed hidden on the Score tab, reachable only if you switched to a different tab entirely. And the fuller hole guide sat behind an "Enable Caddie Guide" tap that, on the phone, you could not actually reach from the live screen. A feature you cannot get to is not a feature. It is a changelog entry.
The Take
A plan you have to go find is a plan you do not use, and an unused plan may as well not exist.
Golf on the course is a game of tiny windows. You have about twenty seconds between "it's my turn" and "I've hit it," and in that window you are not going to tab around an app looking for advice. You are going to pull whatever club feels right and swing. If the plan is not in front of you in that window, it loses every time to instinct - and instinct is exactly the thing the plan was supposed to check. The value of a game plan is not that it exists. It is that it is the last thing you read before you commit.
The plan does not compete with your gut in a menu three taps away. It competes with your gut in the two seconds before you swing, or it does not compete at all.
So we did not build a new feature. We took a good one that was hiding and put it where your eyes already are. On the scoring screen you now get a single line - the club, the playing yardage, the aim - for the hole you are on. Tap it and it expands in place to the full shot-by-shot list without ever leaving the pad. Ignore it and it stays out of your way as one quiet line. It is on both the web app and the phone, and it turns itself on once per round so you are not fishing for a toggle on the first tee.
The Proof
The whole change is about distance - not on the course, but between you and the advice. Before, the plan was a tab away, behind a tap, sometimes unreachable. Now it is one line above the number you are already entering.
The plan is now one line above the number you are entering: club, yardage, aim - tap to open the full hole, tap again to get it out of the way.
None of this changes the plan itself. It is the same club, the same yardage, the same aim it always computed. All that changed is that you can see it at the one second it is useful instead of after the hole is over, which is the difference between a plan and a post-mortem.
The Cut
Most product work is not inventing. It is noticing that the good thing you already built is sitting in the wrong place and moving it six inches to the left. The game plan was always there. Now it is on the pad, in front of you, the last thing you read before you swing - and that is where a plan is supposed to live.
Open a round, tap into the Score tab, and the plan for the hole you are standing on is right above your number.