Monday marked my last day at PrizePicks.

Moving on is bittersweet, but I’m incredibly grateful for the experience. I had the opportunity to work with a talented team, shape a product used by millions, and help establish a design and research team that grew from 3 to 14 designers and researchers.

The scale of the user base was unlike anything I had worked on before. We hit #1 in the App Store, surpassing competitors, and served millions of daily active users. Designing at that scale required a fundamentally different approach—one filled with lessons I’m excited to unpack on future posts.

Laying the foundation: Establishing a scalable design process

When I joined in August 2023, there was no formal design process. The original UI was built by a contract agency and had remained largely unchanged for over two years. Product and engineering teams had continued iterating on top of that foundation, leading to significant design debt and inconsistencies.

To address this, I worked closely with Product, Research, and Engineering to implement a design ops framework to help the design team be more proactive in kicking off new design projects.

• - A Double Diamond design process to guide discovery and execution.

• - A generative and evaluative research process to inform our user centered decision-making.

• - A 2-day, 2-hour design sprint format that allowed teams to quickly validate ideas and iterate.

I’ll write more about these frameworks in a dedicated post, but the impact was clear—teams became more proactive, design was embedded earlier in the product process, and we started tackling problems with greater clarity.

2 day 2 hour design sprint format.

Centering design around the user

One of the first steps in revamping design at PrizePicks was developing a deep understanding of our users. We needed to move beyond assumptions and surface real behavioral insights.

To do this, I hired and partnered with Frank DePalma, an incredible user researcher, to lead a comprehensive journey mapping research initiative. This study analyzed:

• - User behaviors and actions across the end-to-end experience.

• - Key friction points in the flow and opportunities for optimization.

• - Areas to increase engagement and reduce churn.

The outcome? A fully interactive Journey Map that:

• - Visualized all user touchpoints and pain points.

• - Highlighted key themes through embedded research clips.

• - Provided a strategic foundation for product improvements.

This work directly led to several major design initiatives.

Other key design contributions

Here are some of the most impactful projects I led during my time at PrizePicks. I plan to write full case studies on each:

• - Live Lineups / Live Squares: Improving real-time live game play engagement in active lineups.

• - Back Office Redesign: Redesigning the entire suite of internal tools for efficiency.

• - Board Experience: Enhancing the core browsing and selection flow.

• - Checkout Flow: Reducing friction in the payment and entry process.

• - Unreleased Designs (Coming Soon!): I’ll share more details once these projects go live.