Chris Honey

Who they are

Chris Honey is Staff Product Manager – Search at Booksy — he co-founded howler in 2016, a South African nightlife ticketing and cashless-payments brand that ran events at Ultra South Africa and Sónar Barcelona.

Person

Chris joined Booksy in June 2026, stepping into the Staff PM – Search role just this month. He studied Bachelor of Commerce at Vega School at Emeris, then built from scratch: in 2016 he co-founded howler, a South African nightlife brand handling ticketing and cashless payments for music festivals including Ultra South Africa and Sónar in Barcelona. From that founder perch he moved into big-platform product roles — Senior PM at Glovo owning grocery and shopping experiences, then Senior PM at Amazon focused on AI-driven product curation and personalisation. Before Booksy he was Product Director at Noa AI (inside Docplanner), leading the AI assistant for doctors — a role that put him on stage speaking about AI in healthcare (November 2025). The through-line is marketplaces and search problems at scale, with a recurring interest in how AI changes the experience layer. He posts actively on LinkedIn about AI accuracy, team dynamics, product management craft, and career transitions — practical takes, not thought-leadership fluff.

Company

Booksy's most recent capital move was securing growth financing from CIBC Innovation Banking in October 2024 to accelerate new client acquisition and market expansion — not a new equity round, but a signal the company is in growth-execution mode. Revenue hit $65.9 million ARR in 2024, up from $35.2 million in 2023, a meaningful acceleration. The company also bolstered its executive team in 2024 with hires including Greg Sheppard, Selim Dogguy, and Kristina Salen. Its acquisition spree — Lavito (2018), Genbook (September 2021, serving 22,000 businesses), and French rival Kiute (November 2021, described as one of the largest Polish acquisitions abroad) — built out its international footprint, and the platform now powers hundreds of millions of appointments per year.

Market

Booksy positions itself as the largest and fastest-growing booking platform connecting beauty, wellness, and health professionals with local customers, competing directly against Calendly and StyleSeat. The beauty and wellness tech sector is consolidating fast — winner-takes-most dynamics are emerging, driven by platform scale and proprietary appointment data. Rising customer acquisition costs and tightening data-privacy regulation are adding compliance pressure across the board, which favours established platforms with scale over smaller rivals.

How they likely show up

  • Co-founded howler at scale (Ultra South Africa, Sónar Barcelona) → comfortable building from zero and shipping under pressure, not just optimising existing systems.
  • Arc from founder → Glovo → Amazon → Docplanner AI → Booksy Search shows deliberate scope-stacking — each move adds either platform scale or technical depth → likely pushes for well-scoped problems with measurable outcomes.
  • Led AI assistant product at Noa AI (Docplanner) where accuracy and clinical trust were the constraints → probably applies a high bar for AI precision claims and resists shipping half-baked ML features.
  • Active LinkedIn poster on AI accuracy, team dynamics, and career transitions → comfortable being visible and opinionated; responds well to substantive, direct conversations.
  • Possibly — hybrid role-type pattern (builder-turned-operator) → likely bridges engineering and go-to-market conversations more fluently than a pure PM track would.
  • Joined Booksy in June 2026 — brand new in seat → still in listening/orientation mode; likely mapping the search problem space before committing to a roadmap.

Conversation tips

  • → Ask specifically about the Noa AI / Docplanner chapter — he led AI product where accuracy had real clinical stakes, and that's a sharper lens on AI than most PMs carry.
  • → Reference the howler founding story — cashless payments at festivals is a niche, operationally intense problem; he'll have war stories and it signals you read past the LinkedIn headline.
  • → He's just days into the Booksy role — acknowledge he's orienting rather than asking him to defend decisions he hasn't made yet.
  • → He posts about AI accuracy and team dynamics with clear opinions — ask what he actually thinks, not what the consensus is; he engages with specifics.
  • → Don't assume the Amazon stint defines him — the founder arc and the Docplanner AI work are more distinctive and likely more personally meaningful to him.

Toolbox

Openers

  • Open on howler — he co-founded a nightlife ticketing and cashless-payments brand in 2016 that ran at Ultra South Africa and Sónar Barcelona; it's an unusual origin story for a search PM and worth asking what he carried from it.
  • Lead with the Noa AI accuracy angle — his LinkedIn post on why AI accuracy matters for doctors shows he's thought hard about what it means when AI gets it wrong in high-stakes contexts, a pointed take from inside healthcare tech.
  • Reference his November 2025 speaking appearance on AI in healthcare — he's been publicly working through these ideas and will have views he's already stress-tested in front of an audience.

Discovery questions

  1. At Noa AI you were building an AI assistant where clinical accuracy wasn't optional — how did that change how you think about what 'good enough' means for an AI-powered search feature?
  2. You moved from Amazon's AI-driven personalisation to healthcare AI to search at a marketplace like Booksy — what's the hardest thing that doesn't transfer across those different AI contexts?
  3. howler was ticketing and cashless payments for festivals — what did running your own product end-to-end teach you about how you now work inside a larger company's product org?

Avoid

Don't open with generic AI productivity enthusiasm — his public writing shows he's sceptical of surface-level AI claims and specifically focused on accuracy and real-world consequences.

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Sources

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Generated by briefthecall.com from public web sources on June 16, 2026. Each claim is linked to its source above.

Automatically generated by AI from public sources. May be inaccurate or out of date. Remove or correct this profile →