Expanding Hudl's offering to a new market while consolidating and rebuilding the foundation

The Challenge

A new user type, a mental model shift, and two apps becoming one

Hudl had spent years building for coaches, athletes, and administrators — but never for the people cheering from the sidelines. This project set out to bring an entirely new product to market for parents ahead of a 2026 general-availability launch, while using the moment to fix two problems that had been building for years: two overlapping apps splitting the experience, and a navigation model that hadn't kept pace with what Hudl had become for any role.

• 1Define and validate an MVP for a completely new user type — parents — to lay the groundwork for an entirely new, currently untapped revenue line
• 2Consolidate two existing apps into one, delisting the duplicate app and setting up the migration to eliminate its infrastructure and engineering overhead
• 3Fix a platform-wide navigation and information architecture problem for every role, not just the new one — a year-old issue that had gone unaddressed

Kickoff — Starting with a user type that didn't exist yet

Discovery — Scoping the MVP without the roadmap in hand

• 1

  Defining the smallest useful version

  With no existing product to iterate on, the challenge was ruthlessly scoping what belonged in an initial alpha versus what could wait. The goal wasn't feature completeness — it was validating that parents would find enough value to keep coming back, without over-investing in directions that hadn't been tested.

• 2

  A navigation audit across every role

  Revisiting the year-old navigation pitch meant going back through the feedback pattern that had been accumulating from coaches, athletes, and admins — not just parents — to make the case that this was a platform-wide fix, not a one-off for the new experience.

• 3

  Setting up for rapid iteration

  Because so much about this user type was unproven, the emphasis was on building the muscle for fast testing and iteration — instrumenting the alpha to learn quickly rather than trying to get everything right on the first attempt.

• 4

  Turning feedback into signal, not guesswork

  To make sure the right problems were being prioritized rather than working off anecdotes, a feedback pipeline was set up on top of in-app comments, using AI-assisted text analysis to sort raw feedback into recurring categories and themes automatically. Paired with a fan feedback dashboard tracking sentiment trends over time and segmentable by cohort, it gave the team a repeatable way to check that new work was actually addressing what fans and parents cared about most, and a step toward spotting emerging issues early rather than only reacting once they'd become widespread complaints.

• 5

  Not breaking it for everyone else already there

  The legacy app wasn't used exclusively by parents — coaches used it to analyze games, recruiters browsed player profiles, and plenty of traffic came from roles the redesign wasn't primarily built for. Any changes had to serve the new parent experience without quietly breaking value for the mix of other people already relying on the app for very different jobs.

• 6

  Mapping the problem space in detail

  Once the feedback pipeline was running, a clearer picture came into focus: parents expected far more live and on-demand video to already be available than the app actually had. Teams were hard to find and search, pushing people into workarounds just to follow their own kid. The handoff between a livestream and its replay was unreliable, with no good way to communicate delays or early endings. Things the app already knew about a person — their location, their favorited teams — weren't being used to shape what they saw first. And every team or org profile looked nearly identical, creating what the team started calling "profile blindness." Underneath all of it was a quieter signal: parents already sensed there was more content available inside Hudl's main app than in the dedicated fan experience — reinforcing that consolidation, not just a fresh coat of UI, was the right move.

Design Strategy

• 1

  Ship the alpha, then let it teach you

  Rather than design a fully-scoped product up front, the strategy was to get a real, usable version of the parent experience in front of real users as early as possible, treating the alpha period as the primary research tool for what to build next.

• 2

  Getting hands-on: design engineering with AI tooling

  Part of the contribution went beyond design files. This work included writing and merging real pull requests, and building tooling around Claude Skills to help the broader team move faster without cutting corners on quality — automating repetitive parts of the workflow so more time could go toward the harder design and product problems.

• 3

  Fix the foundation once

  Rebuilding navigation and information architecture is disruptive, so it needed to happen deliberately and once — designed to hold up for the new parent experience and for every existing role, rather than patched around the new addition.

• 4

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

  Knowing a subscription was the eventual goal shaped how flows and permissions were structured, without committing to specific paywalls or pricing before there was evidence of what parents would actually value enough to pay for.

• 5

  Advising beyond this workstream

  Because the navigation changes touched surfaces well outside this one workstream, part of the role involved advising other designers working in similar areas — providing insight and direction so the fix stayed consistent across the parts of the product this project didn't directly own. The same was true of the underlying app consolidation: the technical migration was engineering-led, but the strategy for how the two experiences should actually come together was shaped heavily through cross-functional working sessions this role helped push forward.

• 6

  Working across product, UX, marketing, and engineering

  None of this happened in a single-discipline lane. Getting a new user type, a platform-wide navigation fix, and an app consolidation all moving together took tight, continuous collaboration across product, UX, marketing, and engineering — aligning on scope, sequencing the consolidation around the parent rollout, and making sure outreach and messaging matched what the product could actually deliver at each stage.

Pilot Learnings — Turning Data Into a New Point of View

"...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

  Reframing the problem: activation, not retention

  90% of parents who reached an event profile went on to watch video — proof the experience itself worked once people found it. But only around 6% of the pilot cohort activated to that point in the first place. The real gap was upstream: most parents simply never discovered the experience existed. That reframed the challenge for the next phase — less about polishing what already existed, more about building activation into the product itself rather than depending on outside prompts to bring people back.

• 2

  The post-game moment is the hook

  Email opens across the pilot ran 42–50%, comfortably ahead of the 36.9% benchmark, but clicks told the sharper story: click-through on post-game sends ran about 4.5x the benchmark rate, while reminders sent at other times barely moved anyone. That pattern became the organizing principle for how the experience, and the prompts back into it, should be structured going forward.

• 3

  Parents want to create, not just consume

  Interview feedback was consistent: parents didn't just want to watch their athlete's highlights, they wanted to clip, share, and export them — and some were already doing it manually through desktop workarounds before any mobile tooling existed. Highlight creation and shareability turned out to be central to why the experience felt worth returning to, not a nice-to-have layered on top.

• 4

  Trust has to come before automation

  Automated highlight generation was in high demand, but when it missed a moment or mis-tagged an athlete, it quietly undercut confidence in the feature as a whole — a reminder that for something this personal, reliability has to clear a high bar before it can become a core part of the experience.

• 5

  "Parent" isn't one audience

  The pilot also surfaced that the adults around a team don't all play the same role — coaches, team directors/admins, and volunteer team managers each touched adoption differently, with different levels of trust and different reasons to engage. That distinction shaped how outreach and onboarding were thought about heading into a larger rollout, rather than treating every adult around a team the same way.

The Impact

• 1New revenue line: validated MVP and real usage data for a previously untapped user type, ahead of a future subscription offering
• 2Cost efficiency: delisted a duplicate app and kicked off the migration to eliminate its infrastructure, freeing engineering capacity that had been split across two codebases
• 3De-risked investment: proved genuine demand with a closed pilot before committing further engineering spend, rather than guessing at scale
• 4Platform health: resolved a year-old, platform-wide navigation problem affecting every role, not only the new one