Prospect Sports

Everything not all at once.

One of the most useful things about Prospect's backend was how easily it could scale to any sport. Getting there took real strategic planning to figure out how one brand could speak to a wide range of sports and their fan bases. I landed on a distinct palette built around a futuristic, neon feel, then worked through how those colors could translate across different sports.

Licensing player assets, official team info, and logos turned out to be the biggest hurdle, and also the thing that solved everything. I designed a neutral profile for each sport instead of leaning on official assets. Once the Prospect brand was layered into each sport's identity, it clicked, and it also became clear that rolling out one sport at a time was more realistic than launching several at once.

Design to scale.

We chose the NBA as the first sport to integrate, since basketball season was starting right around our launch, which meant most of the early design work was built specifically around basketball. The plan from day one was to expand into the NHL, MLB, MLS, and beyond. As the design came together, I kept checking each choice against that future, asking whether it could scale to another sport or was too locked into basketball specifically. We kept the color system neutral, staying true to the original design theory, so that swap stayed realistic. It was a constant consideration through the rest of design and development.

Fantasy players.

Prospect was launching its first digital and Web3 product, and I started by digging into how the team understood its own audience. They had a clear picture of their ideal customer, but I pushed past that and researched the overlap between fantasy sports, live sports, and sports betting, especially among people with real experience in trading, financial markets, and Web3 or crypto. That research showed the risk of building for just one segment, and made the case for a brand narrative that spoke to both sides of that audience.

Build off the brand.

With the brand set and funding secured, we moved into building the application. We chose Flutter and Dart for cross-platform compatibility, with some components wrapped in React.

Over several meetings, I worked with the Prospect team on a strategic plan I'd used successfully on past projects, one that folded everything we'd learned during the brand build directly into the app's structure. That meant working closely from the start with the development team Prospect had hired in Brazil, so everyone stayed aligned at each stage.

The first task was designing a component library and all the graphical elements the app would need. Once that was approved, I moved into building high-resolution mockups of the customer journey flows and handing them to the development team. We used Zeplin for handoff since it let us export straight from Figma with the right resolution, color matching, fonts, and, most importantly, working React components.

We worked in staggered two-week sprints. I'd finish the first flow ahead of the development schedule, then hand it over to the development team to build while I stayed on to guide component functionality throughout. That kept the timeline tighter and reduced the usual friction.

I still think that approach is the most efficient way to work with remote teams. It makes progress easy to track, and stakeholders can see everything from a single dashboard.