06 — Key Design Decisions
The Calls That
Shaped the Strategy
A discovery engagement is only as good as the decisions it forces. These are the moments where the team had to choose between competing valid options — and the reasoning behind each choice.
DECISION 01 — The Hardest Call
Recommend unified codebase before any new features
Martin wanted new personalization features. Derek wanted to fix the technical architecture first. Jack wanted broadcast improvements. We had one roadmap slot for the first phase and three competing priorities. The temptation was to compromise — do a little of each. We didn't.
THE PRESSURE
Stakeholders wanted to see new user-facing features. Fixing tech debt is invisible to users. Hard to justify to leadership.
VS
OUR POSITION
Every feature shipped on a fragmented codebase requires 4x the effort. Fix the foundation first, then accelerate everything else.
What we showed the data: A new personalization feature on the current architecture would take 4 months to ship across all platforms. On a unified React Native codebase, the same feature ships in 3 weeks. We let that math make the argument. Derek won — but for a reason that also served Martin and Jack.
DECISION 02 — Most Counterintuitive
Don't add more content — make existing content findable
The initial instinct from the business team was to solve engagement by acquiring more content — more games, more sports, more schools. Our research showed the problem wasn't content volume. It was content relevance. Users were drowning in games they didn't care about and couldn't quickly surface the games they did.
The finding that changed the conversation: Churn analysis showed that users who had favorited at least one team churned at significantly lower rates between seasons. The product already had team favoriting. Almost nobody used it. The solution wasn't more content — it was onboarding users into the personalization layer that already existed.
DECISION 03 — Most Debated
Gamification is a retention mechanism, not an engagement gimmick
When gamification came up in the Design Thinking sessions, some stakeholders pushed back — it felt gimmicky, not aligned with the serious nature of sports coverage. The debate nearly killed the feature before it was designed.
CONCERN
Leaderboards and badges feel like a mobile game UX pattern. Parents watching their kids play sports don't want to be gamified.
VS
REFRAME
Gamification isn't about points. It's about giving fans a reason to open the app when there's no live event. It's a bridge mechanism.
How we resolved it: We reframed gamification as "fan identity mechanics" — features that let users express loyalty to their school and team, not compete against strangers. That framing aligned with the platform's emotional core: family connection to local sports. The concept moved forward.
DECISION 04 — Scope Discipline
We scoped out broadcast quality improvements — deliberately
Jack's top priority was broadcast quality — auto-blacklisting, stream consistency, editorial ranking quality. These are real problems. But they're infrastructure problems, not product design problems. Including them in the product strategy deck would have diluted the focus and created a deliverable that tried to solve everything and committed to nothing.
What we did instead: Documented broadcast quality as a parallel technical workstream with its own ownership (engineering, not product design). The Product Strategy Deck stayed focused on user-facing improvements. Both tracks could run concurrently without competing for the same team resources.
THE TENSION WE NEVER FULLY RESOLVED
Personalization vs. completion rate: how much data to collect at signup
The Journey Map revealed a genuine design dilemma: to personalize the experience, we need users to select their teams during account creation. But every additional step in onboarding reduces completion rate. We tested different hypotheses in the design sprints but couldn't reach a confident recommendation within the time constraint. This was the one question we explicitly left for A/B testing post-launch — and documented why.
Why this matters for seniority: Knowing when not to decide — and documenting why — is a more senior move than forcing a recommendation. A junior designer picks a side. A senior designer sets up the test that will answer it correctly.
