Build a self-serve booking prototype with complex real-world constraints.
Companies don't hire builders just to write code; they hire them to solve ambiguity. Moving a manual process like coach hire to a self-serve checkout requires deep product discovery and scoping before you ever touch a text editor. By building this prototype, you prove you can map complex business logic — pricing, routing, and electric vehicle constraints — and ship a functional product without a product manager holding your hand.
The Brief
You need to design and build a self-serve checkout prototype for private coach hire. The client is a tech-first electric bus operator, meaning you aren't just building a generic form. You have to account for different trip types, custom routing, multi-stop logic, and the specific physical constraints of electric vehicles (like battery range and charging stops). You are starting from a single sentence in a job description — there are no wireframes, no specs, and no defined scope.
The hard part is the discovery phase. You must investigate the actual business, determine who the customer is, decide what feature subset to build, and justify what you are explicitly leaving out. You will then use AI coding assistants to build a working, interactive prototype complete with unit tests for the core business logic and robust error handling for edge cases.
The Idea Behind It
Ember operates an electric bus network and wants to eliminate the manual quoting process for private coach hire by letting customers design and update their own journeys. They need a builder who acts with total agency, orchestrating AI agents to turn a loose concept into a polished, tested, and shipped product.
This project forces you to practice exact skills Ember requires: product discovery, scoping under ambiguity, writing testable business logic, and taking full accountability for what you ship.
What You Will Build
- A written discovery and scoping document detailing your architectural decisions and what you explicitly excluded.
- An interactive frontend prototype that allows a customer to build a custom journey with stops.
- Core business logic functions (pricing, distance, or duration calculation) backed by unit tests.
- Form validation and error handling that prevents a user from breaking the booking flow.
- A functional checkout or summary screen that displays the final logic based on the user's input.
The coding is straightforward, but the ambiguity of the product scope and the requirement for real business logic makes it challenging.
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