The problem

A new product team was created to link the media and betting products of a popular Canadian sports app. This team was tasked with creating touch points across the two that would provide user value while also creating a unique product offering to differentiate the product in a saturated market. Although this presented a unique and exciting opportunity, it was unclear to the team what kinds of experiences would provide value in this space, and there were virtually no comparable examples in the market.

What we did

With an unclear roadmap and lack of product strategy, I came in to create a future state experience blueprint. The goal of this was to understand the sports fan/bettor journey in order to discover moments/experiences where the team could deliver value. In order to do this we aimed to apply qual & quant evidence to identify a target audience, visualize the user journey, and inspire future direction of the product team.

This was a large-scale, holistic and highly collaborative project led by myself. In order to execute this project I conducted the following research:

• Diary study: to understand user journeys in real time

• User interviews: to co-create journey maps and probe into user needs

• Survey: to quantify learnings and uncover more about motivations and consumption habits

I also worked closely with data analytics, who conducted a cluster analysis to understand behaviours and usage patterns.

Once the research was completed, I ran a series of workshops with product, design, marketing & analytics in order to unpack learnings and begin brainstorming experiences to serve user needs at different points of the journey. From this, I organized and analyzed our workshops and came up with a set of strategic directions to guide the future roadmap of the product team.

The outcome

Coming out of this project, I was able to provide the team with the following:

• User groups/personas: a breakdown of our user base into different groups based on their behaviours — used to identify our target audience

• User journey: showing connection points and user needs across media & betting — grounding all product decisions in evidence and clear user needs and behaviours

• Strategic directions: opportunity areas/themes to guide the future roadmap and priorities of the product team — grounded in evidence (user research) and considered the perspectives of the full product team

• Guiding principles: important factors to keep in mind when making product decisions

The product team used this to re-strategize and directly changed their roadmap based on the strategic directions outlined in this blueprint — with opportunities planned out on the roadmap for multiple quarters in advance.

Example Artifact: User Journey

In order to protect internal data, this high level user journey view illustrates just some of the learnings from this deliverable.

Example Artifact: Strategic directions mapped with user needs within the user journey

A high level view of strategic directions and their associated users needs, as well as what part of the user journey they serve. The report included more detail on all of these strategic directions and user needs, whereas this slide served as a summary.