A platform to help young athletes share their skills with recruiters and coaches.
I worked with the executive team and a team of contracted developers to take this project from concept to a market-ready MVP. I led the team through research, product strategy & definition, information architecture, and UI design phases.
Duration
12 weeks
Platform
Web-App
Overview
After manually building highlight reels as a service, the team at Sportsreels knew first hand how much pressure and time it took to create something athletes were proud to share with recruiters. More than ever, game film was becoming a larger part of getting noticed—especially during an annual recruiting “dead period” and restrictions from the COVID-19 pandemic. To athletes, the process was not only daunting, but also, conventional highlight reels are difficult to keep updated while the conversation with a recruiter develops over months or seasons.
Services
UX Research
Product Definition
UX/UI Design
As a first step, I often do interviews with stakeholders—meaning anyone who will be impacted by the project (leadership, engineering, marketing, etc.). The main goal of these conversations is to uncover unknowns, foster strategic alignment, and gather subject matter expertise. In order to define what the end product should look like and when it should be done, we look at our problem through the lens of both the business and it’s users. With SportsReelz we discussed three major parameters:
Go-to-market timeline would need to be expedited. Product would need to launch in early spring or miss an annual spike in the recruiting cycle.
Because of their experience with soccer, the MVP would focus on one sport but designed to scale.
Access to a sister platform would be integrated into the login portal as part of the customer acquisition and marketing strategy.
The goal of this research phase was to evaluate key assumptions that would soon define the product we were building. This was the first time research on users had ben conducted. Pulling on experience from the leadership team, we knew one thing going in: game film and highlights were becoming more important than ever in the recruiting process.
“Ideally if I could put something together within the next couple weeks over christmas break… but making the videos is pretty time consuming” [waits until end of seasons]
Drew, Freshman Athlete
“I really expanded my game and [video] hadn't been too popular before covid. Its super important for [coaches] to see what you have and its difficult to recruit during a dead period”
Carly, Sophmore Athlete
“If kids get on your radar early we can kind of start looking at you a little more intentionally. But if a kids not good on film, we're probably not interested.”
Kevin, D2 College Recruiter
“I don't think I’ve done anything to update [my highlight reel] yet. Its still the same from last season and the season before that”
Charlotte, Junior Athlete
