Platform Thinking
Connected individual products into a broader Fan Engagement OS.
PRINCIPAL PRODUCT DESIGN & GROWTH STRATEGIST
Genius Sports
Building a connected platform for modern fan engagement.
Back to Work →Executive Summary
Role
Principal Product Design & Growth Strategist
Team
Cross-functional product organization across Product, Engineering, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and Executive Leadership.
Ownership
- Product Strategy
- Fan Engagement
- Product Marketing
- Executive Storytelling
- Customer Experience
- Design Systems
Business Outcome
Defined strategic product experiences connecting sports organizations, sportsbooks, and fans through interactive engagement products.
Fan Engagement OS and partner-led product development.
Genius Sports was developing a growing suite of products designed to help leagues, teams, sportsbooks, media companies, and brand partners engage fans through content, interactive experiences, and digital channels. My role was to help these capabilities operate as a more connected Fan Engagement OS while creating a stronger way for product teams to learn directly with partners.
The Platform Opportunity
Genius Sports had a broad portfolio of fan-engagement capabilities, but the larger opportunity was to help those products operate as one coherent ecosystem. Partners needed easier ways to create content, configure experiences, distribute engagement products, and understand performance across their digital channels.
My work connected product strategy, customer insight, platform architecture, interface design, and partner collaboration across the Fan Engagement OS.
Working Across Product, Platform, and Partner Experience
As Principal Product Design & Growth Strategist, I led audience engagement and growth strategy across Genius Sports' fan-engagement platform — including Genius Reels, configurable B2B engagement widgets, and partner-facing product experiences — translating fan behavior insights into scalable growth outcomes. Partnering across Product, Engineering, and Marketing, this work increased fan engagement 50% and improved partner adoption 20%. I also created a Lean Design Framework that brought customers directly into discovery, validation, and beta development.
My role extended beyond screen design. I helped identify product gaps, clarify how capabilities should connect, gather customer insight, create research-informed personas, and establish a more repeatable way for teams to build with partners.
Product Discovery
Identified customer, workflow, and organizational gaps before teams committed to solutions.
Partner Research
Gathered direct insight from customers and translated it into product direction.
Cross-Functional Leadership
Worked across product, engineering, design, marketing, customer teams, and leadership.
Process Innovation
Created a Lean Design Framework and partner beta model where no consistent system previously existed.
Connected Platform Strategy
From a Product Suite to a Fan Engagement Operating System
The Fan Engagement OS connected content creation, interactive formats, configurable widgets, partner workflows, distribution, and engagement insight within one larger product ecosystem.
The work required thinking beyond individual features. I helped clarify how products could share patterns, data, workflows, and partner value while still supporting different use cases across leagues, teams, sportsbooks, publishers, and brands.
- Content creation
- Genius Reels
- Interactive widgets
- Campaign configuration
- Partner branding
- Distribution channels
- Fan participation
- Engagement analytics
- Reusable templates
- Platform administration
Content Creation
Helping Partners Turn Sports Moments Into Scalable Content
Genius Reels supported the creation and distribution of sports content designed for modern digital channels. The product opportunity centered on helping partners move from raw sports moments to branded, platform-ready content with greater speed and consistency.
- Content creation workflows
- Reusable formats
- Template selection
- Editing and configuration
- Speed to publish
- Partner branding
- Distribution
- Operational efficiency
- Social and digital channel use cases
Reducing the Distance Between Moment and Audience
The experience needed to make content production faster without removing the control partners required over format, branding, and publishing decisions.
Configurable Partner Products
Making Fan Engagement Easier to Configure and Deploy
The widget ecosystem gave B2B partners a way to bring interactive fan experiences into their own digital properties. I worked on patterns and workflows that helped make those products more understandable, configurable, reusable, and aligned with the broader platform.
- Widget discovery
- Configuration
- Customization
- Brand controls
- Preview states
- Deployment
- Reusability
- Integration
- Partner autonomy
- Commercial scalability
Designing for Partners, Not Only End Fans
Because the platform served B2B customers, the product had to work at two levels: partners needed intuitive controls and reliable deployment, while fans needed engaging and frictionless experiences.
Organizational Opportunity
The Product Team Needed a Better Way to Build With Partners
The organization had product expertise and strong commercial relationships, but there was no consistent partner-led discovery or beta-development model. Important product decisions could move forward without enough direct research, shared personas, or structured validation with the customers expected to use the platform.
I identified this gap and created a Lean Design Framework that connected customer research, product hypotheses, design exploration, partner feedback, and beta learning.
Creating a Repeatable System for Partner-Led Product Development
- 01
Align
Clarify the customer problem, business objective, and product hypothesis.
- 02
Discover
Gather customer, workflow, market, and behavioral insight.
- 03
Define
Translate learning into personas, journeys, needs, and product priorities.
- 04
Co-Create
Develop concepts with selected partners and internal stakeholders.
- 05
Validate
Test workflows, concepts, prototypes, and assumptions.
- 06
Beta
Launch with design partners and establish a structured feedback cadence.
- 07
Learn
Synthesize evidence, document decisions, and identify unresolved risk.
- 08
Scale
Translate validated learning into repeatable platform capabilities.
Giving Product Decisions a Clearer Customer Foundation
To strengthen product direction, I gathered customer insight and created research-informed personas that helped teams better understand partner contexts, responsibilities, motivations, constraints, and success measures.
The personas were not intended as static deliverables. They were designed to help teams evaluate product decisions through the realities of the customers operating the platform.
Customer Learning System
Creating the Foundation for the First Structured Partner Beta Program
The Lean Design Framework became the foundation for a closer partner beta model that allowed product teams to build with customers rather than waiting until after launch to discover whether key assumptions were correct.
This created a repeatable path for partner selection, discovery, prototype validation, feedback, beta learning, and product decision-making.
Partner Selection
Identify customers with relevant use cases, needs, and readiness.
Discovery
Understand current workflows, pain points, constraints, and desired outcomes.
Hypothesis Definition
Document what the team believes and what evidence is needed.
Concept Validation
Review early workflows, prototypes, and product direction.
Beta Participation
Use the product in a realistic partner context.
Feedback Cadence
Create structured moments for observation, input, and decision-making.
Learning Synthesis
Turn partner feedback into prioritized product insight.
Platform Direction
Use evidence to inform what should be refined, scaled, or reconsidered.
Connecting Product, Design, Engineering, Marketing, and Customers
The work required alignment across internal teams and external partners. I translated customer insight into product language, created visual frameworks that made complex decisions easier to discuss, and helped teams connect short-term feature work to the broader platform strategy.
Product
Clarified hypotheses, platform value, priorities, and product implications.
Design
Connected research, architecture, workflows, prototypes, and interface systems.
Engineering
Reduced ambiguity before larger implementation commitments.
Product Marketing
Strengthened the connection between customer needs, product narrative, and partner value.
Customer Teams
Created more structured ways to learn from real partner workflows.
Leadership
Presented frameworks and recommendations that supported decision-making.
Building More Than Features
The most important contribution was not a single screen or experiment. It was helping establish a more connected way to think about the fan-engagement platform and a more disciplined way to build with the partners using it.
Connected Platform Thinking
Helped frame Genius Reels, engagement widgets, and partner tools as parts of one broader Fan Engagement OS.
Customer-Led Development
Created a repeatable framework for bringing partner insight into product decisions.
Reduced Product Risk
Used research, prototypes, experiments, and beta learning to challenge assumptions earlier.
Organizational Enablement
Created shared language and methods that could support product, design, engineering, marketing, and partner teams.
Product Leadership at the Intersection of Platform, Partner, and Fan
The Genius Sports work demonstrates my ability to operate across multiple layers of product development: shaping the platform ecosystem, designing partner-facing tools, understanding end-fan behavior, creating research systems, and improving how teams make decisions together.
Platform Strategy
Connected individual products to a larger ecosystem and partner value proposition.
B2B Product Thinking
Designed for the customers configuring and deploying fan experiences.
Research Leadership
Created personas and customer insight where teams needed a stronger evidence base.
Process Innovation
Built a Lean Design Framework and partner beta model to improve how products were developed.
The Best Fan Products Are Built With the Partners Delivering Them
Genius Sports reinforced that fan engagement cannot be designed only from the perspective of the end user. The platform also has to work for the leagues, teams, sportsbooks, media companies, and brands creating and operating those experiences.
The strongest product decisions came from connecting partner reality, fan behavior, commercial opportunity, technical feasibility, and platform strategy within one shared development process.
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