NBC Sports
Product owner for fantasy sports across App, Web and CMS.
Executed on fantasy sports #1 news outlet Rotoworld major redesign of its website and CMS powering it, the first in about 10 years for the NBC Sports Digital property. Rotoworld features comprehensive sports news, headlines, fantasy columns and premium products for purchase like Draft Guide and Season Pass across NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL. The new, mobile-optimized Rotoworld.com site featured a refreshed UX/UI, improved search functionality and navigation; more robust video content; the expansion of additional player news filters; and streamlined access to premium products. In addition, the site debut its own video platform featuring expanded content across all sports, sponsorship placements and a new DFS toolkit product for additional revenue streams.
Rotoworld Premium - Redesign
Rotoworld’s premium products were the Draft Guide and Season Pass for main sports of NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL. Redesigning and promoting these products led to an increase in revenue by 8% and an increase in engagement by 6% during the first year in market across sports, after a flat past few years.
Rotoworld Free Site - Redesign
Rotoworld.com was a non-mobile optimized website with no documentation or roadmap when I arrived. I started documenting the past while moving us forward, finishing with ~1500 pages of documentation and a full JIRA repository of tickets and backlog and Confluence reference pages.
We refreshed the website utilizing Drupal 8 to pair the frontend and CMS backend, and migrated off 20 year old legacy technology and databases. This led to increased flexibility and optimizations for our editorial staff, as well as our customers with a more modern UI/UX that catered to their core user journeys. Revenue, engagement and retention remained flat which was the goal, to make sure we didn’t lose what we had, while creating new revenue streams through the DFS Toolkit.
CMS - Redesign
Rotoworld’s CMS was built on a custom legacy site, and we bridged the gap by rewriting it to be more flexible in Drupal 8 to marry the frontend with the CMS. I polled our ~50 writers/editorial staff and editorial manager stakeholders to understand the core requirements, nice-to-haves and future roadmap items, working with our engineering and design team to map out how to accomplish our goals and prioritize with level of effort.
Some of the key components included publishing articles, videos, player blurbs, player/team data items plugging into our various APIs, and moving content and utility modules up/down throughout pages and platforms. I took into account WYSIWYG considerations for article writing, tagging complexities, image cropping capabilities, video storage nuances, search complexities and capabilities and created various training documentation and sessions to train our staff and ensure a smooth cutover.
DFS Toolkit - New Product
The DFS toolkits across NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL were designed to help users build smarter lineups utilizing an exclusive algorithm based on various statistics and factors for FanDuel, Yahoo! and DraftKings contests. I proposed the initial idea as a space ripe for disruption and did the initial research and analysis of the new business venture.
There were many different price points and packages, depending on the toolkit, which included a lineup optimizer that enabled users to generate up to 150 lineups, player projections, full customization of lineups and projections, and additional features such as DFS player stats, team stats and news. We married analytics with projections to give customers an easy experience to determine their lineup/s and port them over to the contests seamlessly.
This product added a new revenue stream for Rotoworld and the Toolkit broke even by year 2, fully recovering the initial investment and adding ~15% to Rotoworld’s bottom line.