2021 was a chaotic and transformational year in college sports. Impending legislation would finally allow student-athletes to profit off their Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) while creating unprecedented compliance challenges for athletes and schools.

ProblemTeamworks, the ‘Operating System for Sports’, was already a market-leader in college athletics. But we needed to be first-to-market with a robust NIL compliance solution to support our existing customers and capture additional market share at a critical moment in the industry.
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ApproachWith just months of time to prepare, Teamworks spun up a tiger team to tackle the problem head-on. I led design, working closely with a product owner and three engineers. Meanwhile, our legal team parsed ambiguous rules and directives, trying to nail down requirements in a turbulent environment.

Eliminating frictionWe knew the success of the product hinged on getting accurate transaction data into the system. As much as possible, we off-loaded that responsibility from student-athletes by leveraging APIs and allowing athletes to designate trusted agents to report transactions on their behalf.

In cases where that wasn’t possible, we worked to ensure a painless reporting process for athletes. I benchmarked our manual reporting flow against banking and budgeting apps to ensure it was fast and streamlined.

Customers as design partnersTeamworks has extremely strong customer relationships. We leaned into those and met regularly with compliance officers and operations staff at over a dozen schools.

To move quickly, I often presented conceptual wireframes early in a week and followed up with the same customers days later with a higher-fidelity prototype.

Empowering our sales teamAs we converged on a solution, I partnered with our sales teams to deliver assets and prototypes that allowed them to showcase the planned product and build a pipeline of enthusiastic customers. Together, we grew quarter-over-quarter booked revenue by 460%.

Paving the road aheadTeamworks successfully launched NIL Management alongside the roll-out of NIL legislation. We moved aggressively, leveraged customer relationships, and iterated quickly to navigate a chaotic and ambiguous moment.

Today, the product supports over 100K student-athletes and 200 schools across the country and has been used to report over $200M in student-athlete NIL deals.