In the wake of the NCAA's landmark name, image, and likeness (NIL) decision, the Minneapolis-based startup Roy is building a video sharing platform allowing student-athletes to earn in exchange for exclusive digital content made for their fans, similar to Cameo.

Roy needed help prioritizing several major decisions. Their small team was fractured and lacked a leader to connect design, engineering, and product decisions.

Over six months, I played a significant role in contributing to Roy's holistic strategy, developing a sophisticated brand identity and high-fidelity prototype to support business objectives and guide engineering toward MVP launch.

• Comprehensive Product Development: I helped develop the product with 33 prioritized features by gathering and aligning critical product decisions with stakeholders to ensure a coherent vision for the MVP roadmap.
• Launched and Funded: Roy used the MVP prototype to guide app development and pitch investors, successfully closing $2M in funding before launch in September 2024.
• Structured Product Process: I introduced structured work tracking and requirements processes that enhance visibility and communication for all contributors regarding important product and business decisions.
• Unique Brand and Product Strategy: The distinct brand I designed for Roy informed a clean product design language, facilitating a comprehensive design system and a deep library of collegiate sports content.

My team met Roy for a two-day workshop with key stakeholders from the product, engineering, and business teams to set product strategy. Through several exercises including user journey mapping, we clarified Roy's mission, vision, key differentiators, team roles, and hiring needs.

We consolidated key points into a strategy document, outlining high-impact ideas and business initiatives for the MVP launch in autumn 2024. I took charge of refining the user journeys, using storyboards to illustrate product, marketing, and customer experience touchpoints.

We helped fill in a draft product roadmap by translating the strategy into tangible goals, collaborating with Roy to define several MVP priorities including:

• Athlete Onboarding: On3's student-athlete API generates user profiles to facilitate fast onboarding. Athletes just create an account and verify their identity to claim their profile and launch a campaign.
• Fan Experience: Fans can set their favorite teams, view content from athletes, and customize notifications to stay in the loop about new campaigns.
• Checkout "Contributions": Fan "contribute" to campaigns in exchange for exclusive digital recordings from athletes, enabled by Stripe's seamless checkout flow and card storage.
• Athlete Payout: Receiving campaign funds is as simple as agreeing to terms and recording a digital video to share with fan contributors. Funds are distributed across the season, so athletes can track milestones in the app.

Many of these ideas were too vague, so I helped the Roy team define core experiences and technical requirements. I directed conversations to align on approach and proactively collaborated with the engineers and product managers to stay attuned with implementation decisions.

Roy came to us operating under an alias and didn't know where to begin building the brand, so we set out to establish the design language with an iconic identity. We held a creative workshop to learn about the team's vision for the brand and define their aesthetic preferences through visual swipe exercises.

Working with a visual designer, I curated a moodboard and shared the creative direction, iterating and collecting feedback in small cycles with the team. We delivered the new identity, designed the website, created social media ads and animations to support marketing initiatives, and gave Roy its name, an acronym for "Return on You".

Over four design sprints, I directed two junior designers in building a high-fidelity prototype with sleek animations and real-world content. We collaborated with the engineers and product managers to break down feature sets into cascading epics while ensuring NIL policy compliance with legal counsel.

I contributed to the prototype by leading less defined initiatives like the fan experience and the athlete payout process. I worked flexibly to show Roy frequent updates, favoring low-fidelity wireframes to communicate intent and capture buy-in for evolving decisions for the most ambiguous parts of the MVP.

I worked directly with Roy's engineering team to review the prototype and discuss technical implementation challenges, adjusting the athlete onboarding flow for a smoother experience that simplified its logic. Weekly status meetings and frequent Slack messaging ensured our workstreams flowed together.

I frequently adjusted our approach to accommodate new information and decisions, working proactively to identify action items and map business model updates to design flows. I implemented a structured work ticket framework, enabling our teams to work in sync with shared visibility of tasks, decisions, and requirements.

Roy needed to acquire users fast, so I worked with the product managers to nail down a flow to enable profile claiming. Thanks to the On3 API, any high school or college athlete will automatically be matched with their profile; they simply need to verify their identity and submit proof of a valid offer to launch their first campaign to raise funds for their team selection decision.

The fan experience was tricky to get right due to ambiguity in the NIL legal space, but our legal counsel gave us guardrails to work against as we iterated on the MVP.

From the fan's perspective, the Roy app is essentially a video sharing platform used by their favorite athletes. The app gives sports fans a new way to engage, letting them broadcast support for athletes and incentivize them to stay with their favorite teams.

Understanding the importance of visual appeal, the Roy team tasked me with creating a trendy product language. The Roy app puts a premium on content, using stark colors and maximizing content to put emphasis on athletes.

Following notes from other content-driven platforms like Spotify and Netflix, the app’s design system uses dark UI that makes content, buttons, and data visualizations stand out against the pitch-black device frame.

I balanced screen hierarchy and information by following a system of swipe gestures and obvious controls to facilitate user interaction. The Roy app takes advantage of progressive disclosure patterns and overlaying sheets for tooltips, search fields, filters, and selectors to keep screens minimal and impactful, in contrast to data-heavy sports platforms.