A FIFPRO backed venture to put professional players in control of their own performance data. My job was to take a funded idea and de risk it into a prototype credible enough to win the next round of investment, onboard FIFPRO, and open the door to FIFA. The whole project lives in the ring below. Center is the project, inner ring is the journey, outer ring is the work inside each phase.
Professional footballers generate huge amounts unstructured data. Most of the data is kept within themselves or been shared by their team & sponsors. These data are no external use apart from making the athlete better each day. But what if they can share their data, control over the access and monetize it. The data can be used from research purpose, creation of new formulations & betting.
The ideation & pitch was successfull. To make the idea reach the next stage, we needed first prototype of design to do rigours A/B Testing of the design flow & features.
Most players will never open a laptop to check their data earnings. The mobile experience had to be immediate — earnings visible in seconds, consent flows that didn't feel like legal paperwork, and a dashboard that worked on a 6-inch screen at the edge of a training pitch. Every interaction was stripped back to what a player actually needs to see, right now.
The prototype did its job. The next phase moves from persuasion artifact to a real product — which means shifting from demo flows to edge cases, from three primary journeys to a full permission model, and from a single pitch audience to real players with real data on the line. The design system needs to scale across admin, player, and manager surfaces without losing the trust signals that made the prototype work in a federation room. There is also a native mobile build on the horizon, since most players will never open a laptop to manage their data.
A prototype built to win funding is not a smaller version of the product. It is a separate artifact with a different job. Its job is to make a future feel inevitable to a room of decision makers. Once I designed for that job, instead of pretending I was shipping v1, the work got sharper and the room moved.