Digitally Transforming
the Brooklyn Nets Team Management and Operations
The Brooklyn Nets partnered with sponsor Infor to build a platform designed to gather and share player intel, track player health and development, and manage day-to-day team activities and schedules. This platform would facilitate day-to-day team management and help staff make winning data driven decisions.
Responsibilities
Product & Design Lead
Manage the design, development and delivery of the solution, which included running day-to-day meetings, directing priorities, managing client expectations, defining functional and technical requirements, defining the information architecture, and producing final designs.
Tools & Skills
• Product management
• Client engagement
• Information Architecture
• Wireframing
• Prototyping
• Product ldeation
• Sprint planning
• Agile Development
• User research
• User testing
Product Vision & Goal
The Net’s vision was to build a platform to centralize the team’s intelligence and operations. This would help them reduce the number of applications to use, automate processes and have a centralized place to share information (as opposed to emailing and direct messaging each other).
Design Scope
PROJECT CHALLENGES
This project had been ongoing for 1-year prior to my start. During this time multiple applications were built, none of which were meeting customer expectations due to inadequate resourcing and a mis-match in platform-solution decisions which was largely due to the sponsorship relationship where Infor wanted to deliver a solution on their own technology. This led to several platform limitations, missing features, malfunctioning product, and poor UX which led to an unhappy customer.
My mission was to fix the product issues, redesign the user experience and define a clear product strategy and roadmap that would satisfy customer expectations, and to deliver a version 1 solution for the 2018-2019 season.
Process
Discovery
USER & ORganizationAL INSIGHTS
Market Research
To begin our research, we started looking at tools the Nets currently use to gather and view team and player intel, player contract and salary information, and basketball news. We also looked at a popular soccer General Manager simulation game, which had many similar features the Nets would ultimately want in the context of another franchise sport.
Reviewing these products gave us a better understanding of what features and information we would need to build the solution.
Defining User Roles & NEeds
Affinity Diagram
Define
Product Goals
Challenges
Information Architecture
User Flows
Framework
DEVELOP
Wireframes
To start visualizing what the application could look like and how it work, I created a series of wireframes based on the information architecture and workflows agreed on with the client. This would inform the dev team and designers on required content, navigation and functionality; and would also serve as a useful tool for facilitating customer feedback.
After we agreed on content and design scope, these wireframes were passed on to the design and dev team for dev and UI design.
Feedback
Development Planning & Management
Together with the development team, we agreed on implementing 4-week development cycles consisting of 4 one-week sprints. The first sprint would focus around sprint planning and dev commitment, while the second and thirds sprints were focused on development. The final fourth sprint would be used for UAT and final bug fixes. Throughout the sprints, I would be busy with backlog grooming refining requirements and producing necessary assets for dev.
Prototyping
In order to rapidly build and test out the functionality of the application and keep the dev team engaged in an agile development process, we immediately started building a prototype of my original wireframes. This helped us code the basic functionality of the solution, while identifying bugs and errors to fix.
We would later harden this prototype for product delivery, and apply a unique Nets theming.
User Interface Design
After we gathered and started building the basic requirements, we began exploring the User Experience and styling of the application. Based on agreement with the client, we decided to explore three options; (1) an agnostic design similar to common web application using standard UX metaphors; (2) a minimalist design stylized with Nets brand elements; (3) a bold and fully Nets branded experience.
Following a design review with clickable prototypes, the Nets voted on the third concept on the bottom far right. Based on this our team produced a Nets style guide and coded the components to apply to the solution.
Style Guide
Deliver
Player Search & Profile
Player profile pages feature key background information, agent info, stats, contract, reports, health info and analytics collected on the player. This information would be used by scouts, coaches and GM staff to evaluate trade decisions. The amount of informaiton displayed per player profile would depend on the amount of information collected and that is generally available (e.g. from NBA data sources). Players from smaller leagues for example, would display less information then say a Nets player. The page was built modularly, so if a player had more information it would increase the length of their profile.
Performance Dashboard
The performance dashboard is specific to Nets players and displays various health and performance information gathered from players’ daily wellness survey, bio-sensors and physical tests. The goal is to track and analyze this data to predict when players are at risk of injury, when they are in need of rest, and how they are physically developing. This is essentially a Fit Bit dashboard on steroids.
Player Wellness App
The player wellness app was designed for players. to easily fill out their daily wellness survey. This was previously done everyday via a Google spreadsheet. With this app players could easily take their survey on their own time with a push notification sent out from the Nets performance staff. This app could ultimately be enhanced to feature additional modules around training and scheduling.
Nets Scheduler
This is an app that was built to schedule training sessions. Originally the Nets performance team would send out a text message to all players by typing in the schedule manually. This solution would allow the scheduler to schedule out all activities in the app that mass distribute it to the team, saving them time and effort.
Main Features
Future Development
Conclusions & Lessons Learned
Working with the Brooklyn Nets and building a solution for them was a fantastic but also challenging experience. Prior to my involvement there had been multiple failures on this project due to a lack of management, resourcing and poor technology decisions. The Nets also had no IT department or personnel available to own the project on their end, which made it extremely difficult to receive what we needed, as well as set expectations. I was brought in to turn around these issues, fix the broken customer relationship and deliver.
When I had started there was a partially built product with multiple issues. There was also no documentation around the product and several key steps in product development had missed, including architecting a proper data structure required as the backbone to the solution. There were also no comprehensive designs, centralized requirements or a product roadmap in place.
Ultimately I needed to start from scratch taking what I could learn from the work done before, and define a new design and development plan, all within an 7-month timeframe. Selling this internally was not an easy task since it required removing most of my company’s technology, which was not feasible for what the client needed.
Working together with a fantastic dev team, we gradually bought back the client’s trust and were ultimately able to deliver a solution they would eventually use to support their back office operations in the 2018-2019 season.