Bringing parents into Hudl for the first time — and rebuilding the foundation underneath them

Parents had always watched games and chased highlights on Hudl, but never had a product of their own. Building one was also the moment to fix two long-standing problems.

• 1Define and validate a parent MVP — groundwork for an untapped revenue line
• 2Merge two overlapping apps into one, delisting the duplicate and its engineering overhead
• 3Fix a year-old navigation and information architecture problem platform-wide

• 1

  Two apps, one job

  Parents bounced between two apps for the full picture of their athlete's season, and sensed Hudl's main app had more content than the fan app built for them. Consolidation mattered as much as any new screen.

• 2

  A navigation problem a year in the making

  Discovery resurfaced a mental-model problem flagged a year earlier and never prioritized. Feedback from coaches, athletes, and admins made the case for a platform-wide fix, not a parent one-off.

• 3

  Turning feedback into signal

  AI-assisted text analysis sorted in-app comments into recurring themes, feeding a sentiment dashboard segmentable by cohort — a repeatable check, instead of anecdotes, on whether new work addressed what parents cared about most.

  
• 4

  What parents were running into

  Parents expected far more video than existed. Teams were hard to find, forcing workarounds just to follow their own kid. Location and favorite teams didn't shape what anyone saw first. And every team profile looked the same — what the team called "profile blindness."

• 5

  Not breaking it for everyone else

  Coaches analyzed games in the legacy app and recruiters browsed player profiles there. Every change had to serve parents without quietly breaking those jobs.

• 6

  Built to learn fast

  The alpha was instrumented to learn quickly, and parent-facing features were shaped through an AI-forward discovery loop — production-fidelity prototypes, updated live on calls with families.

• 1

  Ship the alpha, then let it teach you

  Rather than scope everything up front, get a real version in front of families early and treat the alpha as the main research tool.

• 2

  Fix the foundation once

  Rebuilding navigation is disruptive, so it happened once and deliberately — designed for parents and every existing role, not patched around the newcomer.

• 3

  Design the seams for monetization, don't build it yet

  A future subscription shaped flows and permissions, without committing to paywalls or pricing before parents showed what they'd pay for.

• 4

  Prototype in code, polish in code

  Prototypes were built at production fidelity, and hands-on design engineering carried polish straight into the codebase instead of a written handoff.

• 5

  Leading beyond this workstream

  The navigation changes reached surfaces this project didn't own, so part of the role was advising other designers to keep them consistent. Consolidation was sequenced with product, marketing, and engineering around the parent rollout, keeping messaging honest about what shipped when.

"...the data wasn't telling us retention was broken — it was telling us most parents never found the experience in the first place. We weren't fighting a retention problem. We were fighting an activation problem."

• 1

  Activation, not retention

  Nearly every parent who reached an event page watched video, but few got there. The product worked; discovery didn't. The next phase built activation into the product instead of relying on outside prompts.

• 2

  The post-game moment is the hook

  Email opens ran 42–50% against a 36.9% benchmark, but only post-game sends drove meaningful clicks. That timing became the organizing principle for prompts back into the experience.

• 3

  Parents want to create, not just consume

  Parents wanted to clip, share, and export their athlete's highlights — some already did through desktop workarounds. Creation was a core reason to return, not a nice-to-have.

• 4

  Trust before automation

  Demand for automated highlights was high, but one missed moment or mis-tagged athlete undercut trust in the whole feature. For something this personal, reliability has to clear a high bar first.

• 5

  "Parent" isn't one audience

  Coaches, team admins, and volunteer team managers each shaped adoption differently, with different levels of trust — so outreach and onboarding were rebuilt around those roles instead of treating every adult around a team the same.

• 1New revenue line: 8,500+ engaged parents and real usage data for a previously untapped user type
• 2Cost efficiency: one app delisted and its codebase being retired, freeing engineering capacity
• 3De-risked investment: demand proven with a 150-parent alpha before scaling engineering spend
• 4Platform health: a year-old navigation problem resolved for every role