Leading Design at FanDuel Canada
Product Design Manager - FanDuel Canada // FanDuel
Activities - Product design, A/B testing
New Ticket Intake Process
With the design team being vastly outnumbered by product 12 to 1, I wanted to introduce some structure into how design tickets / projects came into the design team. When I joined the team, many projects were ad hoc requests which meant that work wasn't being tracked and the existing tickets weren't ever getting done. There was no prioritization for tickets against a backlog or roadmap. Ad hoc projects didn't have any requirements so often were seen as a quick ask when the reality was they were often full-fledged features.
I introduced a new ticket intake process to bring rigor to how tickets were created, prioritized, and picked up by the design team. I broke our time down into month-long sprints and worked with designers to estimate capacity. Part of this estimation came from ensuring tickets had appropriate requirements that we reviewed with the product teams before they would be accepted onto the roadmap. Any ad hoc requests required a ticket going forward, and all work was tracked to give the entire design, engineering and product organizations visibility into the work being done.
Through this process I was able to create a rough design roadmap to mirror product's roadmap, and our capacity to work through tickets increased because less time was spent on hunting down requirements for loosely formed design asks.
Additionally I created a kick off process and began facilitating team retros with both the design team and a combination of the design and product teams. We were able to improve communication between teams as well as improve the initial version of the ticket intake process I created through generating feedback in these retro sessions.
Part of my plan for improving UX maturity on the team
Canada Platform Migration
When I joined the Canada team, the app and website were both built on a third party white label platform. A migration from the third party platform to a FanDuel-owned platform was on the roadmap, but was originally slated for 2025 or later. In late 2022 and early 2023, the Canada business performed more successfully than we could have anticipated, which meant that by mid-2023 we had outgrown our third party platform. The initial time for the migration was moved up by two years and kicked off in July 2023.
The migration would move users off of the Canada third party tech to FanDuel proprietary tech. Benefits of moving platforms were huge, but the task of migrating such a huge volume of users was daunting.
First I performed a gap analysis between the Canada software and the US software to help identify requirements for the migration. These requirements were split into three categories: Regulatory, Day 1 Mandatory and Day 1 Nice to Have.
My team of three designers and myself were tasked with creating the screens to fulfill the first two buckets of requirements on a swift timeline working with five engineering teams. I led the team in connecting with our US counterparts to learn about the US platform, get feedback on the designs to ensure designs aligned with the US front end, and handing them off to both our engineering teams and to our US design teams who would be taking future ownership of these screens.
I developed a process for working with our product counterparts, US teams and engineering teams up front for the migration to go as smoothly as possible, and gathered feedback throughout to ensure the process was working well for everyone. I managed tickets, capacity and requirements, and negotiated with development and product teams to help the designers secure some UX wins along the way even with the tight deadlines.
The design work timeline on the migration was very short - kicking off in July, with requirements complete at the end of August and designs complete at the end of December.
The details between the before and after may seem minor, but multiplied across hundreds of screens, the migration represented a major design challenge
Overview
I joined the Canada team in February of 2023. At the time of my joining, the team had only one designer and no dedicated manager. This designer was working on designs for a group of 12 product managers and product owners, being vastly outnumbered. On the plus side, the product team was highly engaged, had a great working relationship with the designer on the team and was hungry for design work which was a great starting point.
Due to a migration, the team was dissolved at the end of 2023 and we were absorbed into a different design team. During my time on Team Canada, I grew the team from one designer to three designers, introduced new rigor and process with a goal of growing UX maturity and led the team through a major software migration.
In 2023, the Canada platform was responsible for $500m in revenue, hosting 35 million bets placed and 720 unique casino games.