Chris Honey

Who they are

Chris Honey is Staff Product Manager at Booksy — co-founded howler in 2016, a South African nightlife ticketing and cashless payments company that served festivals like Ultra South Africa and Sónar Barcelona.

Person

Chris holds a Bachelor of Commerce from Vega School at Emeris and built his early career by founding howler in 2016 — a South African nightlife ticketing and cashless payments company that ran events as large as Ultra South Africa and Sónar in Barcelona, where he was Co-Founder and Head of Product/Engineering. After howler he moved into scaled consumer tech: Senior PM at Glovo owning grocery and shopping experiences, then Product Lead at Amazon for Seasonal Shopping in the US market, then Senior PM for AI-driven product curation and personalization. He then stepped into his most complex build yet at Docplanner, directing the product for Noa — an AI assistant for doctors — before joining Booksy in June 2026 as Staff Product Manager, where he's working on Agentic Discovery. The through-line is founder-to-operator: each move adds scale and domain complexity, from nightlife payments to grocery logistics to clinical AI to beauty-and-wellness. He writes actively on LinkedIn and spoke at Twilio SIGNALconf in 2025 on AI adoption and product leadership; his posts cover AI in healthcare, product leadership, and the impact of AI on teams.

Company

Booksy's most recent capital event was an $84.1 million Later Stage VC round in September 2025, which followed a prior Series C and brings its total funding to $169 million across 14 rounds. Revenue reached $65.9 million ARR in 2024, up from $35.2 million in 2023, with the company reporting a 95% merchant retention rate supported by machine-learning models launched in 2025 that predict churn and automate personalized promotions. In October 2024, Booksy secured additional growth capital from CIBC Innovation Banking to accelerate client acquisition and market expansion. The company also strengthened its executive team in 2024 with the appointments of Greg Sheppard, Selim Dogguy, and Kristina Salen. Booksy is now expanding beyond booking into B2B e-commerce with Booksy Store, letting salon owners manage bookings, inventory, and wholesale product ordering in one interface.

Market

Booksy bills itself as the largest and fastest-growing booking platform connecting beauty, wellness, and health professionals with local customers, powering hundreds of millions of appointments annually. Its main competitors are Fresha, Vagaro, Mindbody, StyleSeat, Calendly, and hyper-niche platforms like Pabau for medical spas. The beauty and wellness tech sector is consolidating fast — platform scale and proprietary user data are becoming the primary moat — while rising customer acquisition costs and data-privacy and gig-worker regulation are increasing compliance pressure across the board.

How they likely show up

  • Founded howler at what appears to be an early career stage and ran product and engineering simultaneously → comfortable owning ambiguous, cross-functional scope without a playbook.
  • Arc from founder → Glovo → Amazon → Docplanner → Booksy shows deliberate progression through increasingly regulated and data-heavy domains → likely brings a structured risk lens to product decisions, not just velocity.
  • Led Noa AI — a clinical accuracy-sensitive product for doctors — after running grocery personalization at Amazon → shifts between B2C and high-stakes B2B contexts without anchoring to one mode.
  • Active LinkedIn poster on AI in healthcare, product leadership, and AI's impact on teams → comfortable being visible and opinionated; probably engages substantively when asked for a take.
  • Spoke at Twilio SIGNALconf on AI adoption and product leadership → has framed views on where AI is over-hyped or misapplied, not just a practitioner.
  • Possibly — working on Agentic Discovery at Booksy remotely from Barcelona → likely values async-first, outcomes-over-presence ways of working.

Conversation tips

  • → Reference Noa AI specifically — he led product for a clinical AI assistant where accuracy was a hard constraint, and that shapes how he thinks about AI reliability and trust in ways most consumer PM backgrounds don't.
  • → Ask about the howler-to-big-tech transition — going from co-founder running product and engineering to Senior PM at Glovo and Amazon is a deliberate choice worth understanding.
  • → He posted about hiring a senior product role at Booksy recently, so he's actively building a team — questions about the kind of product thinking he's hiring for will land well.
  • → He spoke at SIGNALconf on AI adoption: come with a view, not a question like 'what do you think about AI?' — he'll engage more with a specific disagreement or tradeoff.
  • → Avoid treating him as a pure consumer PM — his last two roles before Booksy were in healthcare AI and scaled personalization; he's operating with a more complex product surface than beauty booking alone.

Toolbox

Openers

  • Open on Noa AI — he directed the product for Docplanner's AI assistant for doctors, where accuracy was the central design constraint, and now he's applying that lens to Agentic Discovery at Booksy. That's a specific through-line worth pulling on.
  • Mention howler — he co-founded a nightlife ticketing and cashless payments company in South Africa in 2016 that ran at festival scale (Ultra South Africa, Sónar Barcelona). It signals he thinks about payments, venue logistics, and consumer behaviour from first principles, not just prior product specs.
  • Reference his Twilio SIGNALconf talk on AI adoption and product leadership — he's presented publicly on where AI changes the PM job and where it doesn't, which means he has a formed opinion you can test or challenge.

Discovery questions

  1. At Docplanner, Noa was an AI assistant where a wrong answer had real clinical consequences — how did that change how you defined 'good enough' for a model output versus your earlier work on personalization at Amazon?
  2. Booksy is moving from booking platform into B2B e-commerce with Booksy Store — where does Agentic Discovery fit in that broader platform shift, and what's the hardest product problem in it right now?
  3. You went from co-founding and running product and engineering at howler to being a Senior PM inside Glovo and Amazon — what did you have to unlearn going from founder mode to working inside someone else's structure?

Avoid

Don't pitch generic AI-will-transform-your-product narratives — he's built clinical AI where accuracy constraints are real and has spoken publicly on AI adoption; he'll want specifics, not broad enthusiasm.

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Sources

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Generated by briefthecall.com from public web sources on July 17, 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 →