A career development solution for universities and professional athletic teams to unlock athletes’ potential outside of sports. The mobile solution creates new opportunities for learning, engages alumni communities, and measures impact.
MY ROLE.
Technical Product Manager
I worked with our multidisciplinary team to take this project from ideation to launch and through continuous iterations. I collaborated directly with the founder of NextPlay, a product designer, a react native engineer and two web engineers. I was a translator between the technical and non-technical stakeholders, and helped the team rapidly turnaround version updates to fulfill users’ needs.
We operated within an Agile development framework with sprints that the founder and I prioritized. I wrote user stories, specified feature requirements, created wireframes and prototypes, set development priorities, bug tested and debugged user issues. I hosted daily standup meetings with engineers and weekly standup meetings with the founder of NextPlay.
KEY METRICS.
Went to market in 4 months with 6 white-labeled mobile applications
600+ users within 2 months of launch
13,000+ accrued annual interactions
PRODUCT.
Nextplay Careers builds private digital communities for athletes to engage with custom career development content, build their network with other athletes, and prepare for life after sports.
The white labeled solution entails three digital platforms, customized for different user types of the private digital communities.
Platform 1: Mobile application (iOS & Android) for current players and alumni
Each university/professional athletic teams’ mobile application is uniquely branded with their chosen name (ie. Duke Football Future, Hawkeye Legacy) on the app store. Current players and alumni of the team can download the application and be a part of the private community. Alumni and team admins can publish career development contents to the community’s timeline, create alumni groups, and most importantly, interact with current players.
Platform 2: Web application for sports teams’ management
Web application for each team to monitor activities and maintain engagements within their private digital community. They can post or remove contents on Timeline, approve or suspend users and even create events.
Platform 3: Web application for NextPlay Careers admins
A central portal for NextPlay’s administrators to manage users and content across all teams’ private digital communities.
Click to see more official partners: https://www.nextplay.me/partners
Wireframes I mocked up in Figma for adding new users with CSV import. This allows teams to easily transform player data into acceptable format and upload hundreds of players at once instead of manually adding one by one.
Wireframes I mocked up in Figma for users to edit work experience. Previously, users could only enter one work experience at sign up and was unable to edit, delete or add any additional experiences.
Wireframes I mocked up in Figma for large video file uploads to inform users of different upload stages. Previously, the platform only displays a continuous loading signs that could last up to a few minutes, which many users misinterpreted as the platform has froze.
