Product Leadership · Sports Technology · Design Systems · AI-Enabled Delivery
Sportsmo
Leading product design and delivery for a real-time college sports app, from early concept through launch on a fixed football-season deadline.
Download on the App Store
Overview
Sportsmo began as a founder-led idea for a new way to connect college sports fans with NIL giving. Fans could contribute money around live game events, follow the action in real time, connect with friends, and see the impact of their contributions.
The challenge was time. We had less than eight months to turn the concept into a working mobile app before the start of the 2025 college football season.
My Role
I joined during the early discovery phase while wrapping another engagement, then quickly grew into one of the primary leaders on the project. I owned the product design work, built the design system in Figma, and became one of the main points of contact with the founder.
I also took on responsibilities that extended well beyond design. I ran stand-ups, led retrospectives and demos, maintained the project roadmap and Gantt chart, helped set priorities, and kept the team focused on the launch deadline. Although there was a project lead and technical lead, I was often the person setting the day-to-day direction and helping the team work through product and delivery decisions.
Approach
The product depended on real-time sports data, so the challenge was not only designing the interface but helping the team understand how live events, API endpoints, product states, and giving interactions fit together.
Because the engineering team was offshore and had limited familiarity with American football, I became the bridge between the product vision, the domain, and the technical implementation. To reduce the team's dependency on live access to me, I created a shared AI product-support resource using our internal tools. It combined API documentation, project context, requirements, and football domain knowledge so developers could get reliable guidance across time zones.
In parallel, I built an extensive Figma design system and component library so the team could move quickly while maintaining consistency as the product grew.
Outcome
Sportsmo launched in both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store in time for the 2025 college football season. Despite the compressed timeline and distributed team, we delivered most of the planned product vision and made it through the season without major technical issues.
The product continued to expand after launch, including support for college basketball and additional fan experiences. Sportsmo continued into a second season after my engagement ended.